For a long time Cerb was me-shaped: one admin session, uploads that lived in a shared pile, content that existed to feed the public site. That works until you want a friend to drop a zip without you babysitting every file.
So the foundation landed first:
- Real users with password hashes and roles (owner vs friend)
- Sessions that are not a shared secret taped to the wall
- Per-user drop storage on disk, with quotas shown in human units instead of mystery byte soup
- Visibility so “on my box” does not automatically mean “on the internet”
This is the boring layer everything else hangs on. Invites, media compositions, share links, and People only make sense once accounts and storage are first-class.
It is still not a SaaS. Default friend quota is intentionally small. If someone needs more, they ask — which is the point. Infinite free hosting is how you wake up to a full disk and a bad mood.
Member UX for this layer now lives under /hub/* on Hub; staff CMS stays on Admin — Hub is not Admin.