Self hosted pinning service

Hi, I have an interesting use case for ipfs, and I’m struggling to wrap my head around how this would be implemented, or most importantly whether it already has been. Sorry if this is an idiot first question :]

I’m a volunteer tech guy for a community that needs some infrastructure for filesharing in a way that’s publicly accessable. Is there a simple way for me to run an ipfs node with some kind of easy web interface where people can log in and upload files for my server to pin? I guess this is exactly what pinata does, but the idea of course is to put it on my own hard drive so that many TB would be manageable.

The approach I was thinking about is something like running nextcloud on a server and setting up a specific directory for external storage, and configuring my ipfs node to automatically pin anything that lands in that directory. But without some kind of integration in the interface they use that generates a share link to its content address in ipfs, I think the users would probably never even encounter the ipfs side of things.

The other approach I had in mind is to have users install the ipfs desktop, pin the content, and somehow configure my node such that they can connect to it with some credentials and have it replicate their content, ideally preserving metadata in such a way that other users in the community could browse it in some kind of easy ui.

Has anyone done something like this? I think it’d be really cool to use it to let the community participate in hosting the media that we publish and to use it as a learning opportunity for the dweb world. Thanks.

You might be interested in peergos https://peergos.org/

I think Quanta is the only ‘open source’ pinning service that exists. My side project. Not only is it a pinning service, but you also get Fediverse social media features as well. People on this forum will be sick of hearing me mention it, but I generally don’t self-promote it unless it’s a direct answer to someone’s question:

It’s been featured in a past IPFS newsletter and supposedly will only be a few more months or years before it gets listed on the Protocol Labs “Ecosystems” page.