I have no such app installed. Which foss app is currently the most promising/successful/widely used one?

If there are so many, maybe it’s time to work together …

After some reading it looks to me like the biggest difference is that Dashbeam uses an established peer-to-peer system (Iroh), and can operate without servers. Magic Wormhole uses servers instead of a peer-to-peer network to set up connections. Magic Wormhole requires a “mailbox” server to negotiate a connection, and may require a relay server for NAT traversal.

Dashbeam might also use a relay (I’m not positive about this - relays are described in the Iroh docs, and I don’t know for sure whether Dashbeam uses them). But Dashbeam advertises NAT hole punching that might avoid use of a relay in more situations. That should lead to higher transfer rates since you’re not limited by the bandwidth of a relay run as a public service.

Dashbeam doesn’t use a mailbox server. The trade-off is that Dashbeam “tickets” are too long to read over the phone, or to type in by hand. Magic Wormhole’s pairing codes are designed to be short for exactly those use cases.

Dashbeam has mobile apps, it look like Magic Wormhole doesn’t. Edit: looks like there are mobile apps after all!

So it looks like the advantages of Dashbeam are:

• potentially faster transfers
• doesn’t rely on publicly operated servers
• appeal to fans of peer-to-peer protocols
• mobile support

And the downside I see is:

• you need an existing digital channel to send a ticket to set up a connection

Compared to some other services, like Pairdrop.net, it looks like Dashbeam might not have automatic local network discovery.

Syncthing is a file syncing service. This is a file transfer service.

Dashbeam is more for occasional transfers, it seems. You want to send me something right now, you use Dashbeam.

Syncthing (which is great and I use) is more for background sync between devices. I use it to sync and backup my important documents automagically between my devices.

So, Syncthing is definitely great and you should use it, if it fits your usecase. I don’t know about Dashbeam (in the sense of whether it actually works or not), but the usecase seems a little different.

I haven’t used this but from their website / description it looks like they are more of a on-demand file transfer service, e.g. they are comparing themselves to Magic Wormhole, PairDrop, LocalSend, etc.

Syncthing has its roots in being used for automatic file/folder synchronization, that’s its strength. But sure, you could set it up for a one-time file transfer too if the other person is willing to set up Syncthing on their end.

DashBeam does seem to be able to do transfers via web browser, that could be an advantage if the person you want to transfer something to/from does not want to install anything extra on their device… but I don’t know how well any of that works in practice.

Good question, the actual idea for both is a great one and not something I was aware of.

Looking up an actual comparison, I can’t find one yet since this is so new, but perhaps that’s part of the plus, since new might mean better transfer process and speed, security, etc. Old isn’t always a bad thing, but some commentary I ran across looking for alternatives to Syncthing was because it had limitations they ran into due to it being designed for specific needs and not general purpose?