alt Hacker NewsThank you for pointing it out. Maybe the website does a better job in this then the GitHub repo: https://linkedrecords.com/
But even on the website I guess it could be explained a little bit better.
the first question is where is the "user". It could be the end user like you and me who want's to use some app (e.g. calorie tracker). Or it could be a company subscribing to a SaaS. In this case the user would not be the end user but the company.
The later is the more interesting use case in my opinion. Now the user/company can subscribe to a linkedrecord based SaaS and let it point to a linkedrecord backend this company trusts. the company itself does not need to operate neither the SaaS app (which is a simple SPA) nor the backend.
One interesting open question now is: It is easy to say how the backend provider would bill the company for its services. It is harder for the app provider (the SPA) to bill their services?
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But also the first scenario is possible where the user is and end user. The App provider could allow to let the user pick the backend. So when the user opens the app in the browser, he will be asked to select a preconfigured backend or specify a custom linkedrecords backend URL. Once the user made this choice the app will trigger a login flow at the choosen linkedrecords backend and the app will send all request to this backend.
Yeah, you definitely should have linked to that instead of a Github repo (or copied the text across to the repo readme).
The copy is still pretty focused on the Developer experience building something that uses your thing. But I can't imagine anybody choosing to use this for a product until they know for sure that the end-user experience is painless and frictionless.
I'm actually in the market for something like this. I'm building a game that could benefit from letting people store their savegames in the cloud, but I don't see any particular reason for it to be _my_ cloud. I'd rather not store user/pass information or data at my end, and I'm sure players aren't interested in making an account on my site just to play the game.
If there was something like this that was sufficiently frictionless (on the order of magnitude of going through a "Log in with Google" flow) to set up, I'd be keen to give it a shot. But if there was anything user facing that felt "Open Source", that would kill the idea dead.
Do you have an example of a user setup flow?