IIRC the visison was that all applications could implement this and you could provide that application with your remotestorage URL, which you could self host.
I looked into this some time ago as I was fed up with WebDAV being the only viable open protocol for file shares/synchronization (especially after hosting my own NextCloud instance, which OOMed because the XML blobs for a large folder it wanted to create as a response used too much memory) and found it through this gist [0] which was a statement about Flock [1] shutting down.
It looks like a cool and not that complex protocol, but all the implementations seem to be unmaintained.
And the official javascript client [2] seems to be ironically be used mostly to access Google Drive or DropBox
Thanks for sharing, this is super interesting. Although it doesn't seem to be super active these days. Probably because it is difficult to commercialize local first. That might be why we need a widely adopted and super flexible standard to become attractive to hosters of such services.
My comment may fit a bit better here as this post talks about a protocol instead.
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https://remotestorage.io/ was a protocol intended for this.
IIRC the visison was that all applications could implement this and you could provide that application with your remotestorage URL, which you could self host.
I looked into this some time ago as I was fed up with WebDAV being the only viable open protocol for file shares/synchronization (especially after hosting my own NextCloud instance, which OOMed because the XML blobs for a large folder it wanted to create as a response used too much memory) and found it through this gist [0] which was a statement about Flock [1] shutting down.
It looks like a cool and not that complex protocol, but all the implementations seem to be unmaintained.
And the official javascript client [2] seems to be ironically be used mostly to access Google Drive or DropBox
Remotestorage also has an internet draft https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-dejong-remotestorage/ which is relatively easy to understand and not very long.
[0] https://gist.github.com/rhodey/873ae9d527d8d2a38213
[1] https://github.com/signalapp/Flock
[2] https://github.com/remotestorage/remotestorage.js