swarm

x.org/ Doesn't allow for fully peer-to-peer messaging, but is decentralized and federated like XMPP. Probably the closest thing on this list to a framework (handles both messaging and storage). Last time I looked at it, my main concern was how much implicit trust users needed to place in homeserver providers (messages and user profiles are stored in plaintext). Unless this has changed, I don't find it viable for any app that values user privacy. Even federated networks eventually gravitate towards a large degree of centralization once the tech becomes mainstream (see email). If any servers are used at all in a privacy-minded app, they need to be zero-knowledge as far as I'm concerned, for actual user data at the very least, if not metadata as well (I realize the latter is an unsolved problem). RemoteStorage: https://remotestorage.io/ A decentralized, federated protocol and library for data & file storage. Also used this for Toc. Worked as advertised but I'm looking to explore fully p2p alternatives for my next project. The main problems I ran into (asides from the non-fully-p2p architecture) was the rather clunky API (for instance, it requires developers to provide a schema to fully specify objects they want to store, but doesn't provide a versioning and migration mechanism to take advantage of the schema specs, although it is planned), and the fact that encryption for data at rest wasn't implemented (until I finished working on a custom encryption layer for Toc built on top of the library). Kinto: http://kinto.readthedocs.org/en/latest/ Similar to RemoteStorage, but decentralized discovery is planned and not implemented yet. It's built by Mozilla and apparently used in Firefox and Firefox OS (I'd assume for Firefox Sync?). They also have a comparison table with RemoteStorage as a part of their docs if you're interested in a more detailed (but possibly impartial) comparison [2]. [2] http://kinto.readthedocs.org/en/latest/overview.html#compari... Swarm: https://github.com/gritzko/swarm A decentralized data replication library that's built on ops-based CRDTs [3]. Some very impressive work here. Although I recently found out that V1 of the library no longer supports fully p2p replication due to architectural changes, which made it a lot less interesting for my use cases. [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict-free_replicated_data_... Replikativ: https://github.com/replikativ/replikativ The one I'm most excited about personally. Similar to Swarm, a CRDT-based data replication library, but even more ambitious (they envision an open data exchange whereby users fully control their own data, and can specify any number of applications to have access to that data, instead of the status quo where user data is kept in closed, per-application silos). There's a comparison with other alternatives, including Swarm, in their README [4]. They also plan to have pure browser-based p2p replication through WebRTC, which is exactly what I'm looking for. It's built in and for Clojure and ClojureScript, but JavaScript support is in the works. As if I needed any more incentive to get started on my first ClojureScript app. =) [4] https://github.com/replikativ/replikativ#alternatives GunJS: http://gun.js.org/#step1 A decentralized, replicated graph database. The pitch is very impressive sounding, but I'm hesitant to actually use this because they promise a lot of replication magic, but the replication is built on a home-grown algorithm rather than something rigorously peer-reviewed and implemented industry-wide like CRDTs. I'd love to hear from anyone who has actual working experience with it though. IPFS: https://ipfs.io/ IPFS and its suite of associated libraries has already been mentioned elsewhere in this thread, so I won't elaborate on it.

nvolve sharing and collaboration between multiple users, and in applications where the size of each user's dataset is too large to be managed fully locally. My previous project, Toc Messenger [1], used a custom encryption layer over remoteStorage [2] to achieve something close to this, but remoteStorage is not a fully distributed protocol, and has to rely on the existence of a centralized storage server to function. For my next project, I'm hoping to experiment with something like Swarm [3] for the data layer instead, which uses CRDTs for conflict resolution and supposedly supports direct P2P sync in the upcoming 1.0 release [4]. [1] http://toc.im/ [2] http://remotestorage.io/ [3] https://github.com/gritzko/swarm [4] http://swarmjs.github.io/articles/2of5/