Earthstar – A database for private, distributed, offline-first applications

I tried to read about Willow, but could never make heads or tails of it [1]. It seems to be a hierarchical key value store with a bunch of extra fields for timestamps and cryptographic tokens, but it's woefully short on working examples. Even the recent Rust library [2] is effectively a bunch of abstract classes with implementations that just throw errors.

I could make a quip about the state of European tech sophistication, but I'll let it pass with a polite smile.

[0] https://willowprotocol.org/earthstar/spec/

[1] https://willowprotocol.org/specs/data-model/index.html#data_...

[2] https://github.com/earthstar-project/willow-rs/tree/main

- data is named, not content addressed (to support overwrite & deletion), so the primitive data type is associative arrays of names to documents instead of sets of messages

- documents are grouped into "shares" and you have to know the "share address" before the server will acknowledge that it indeed has documents in that share.

Seems like an interesting approach: part way private, part way open. It think projects like this which pick an extreme on that axis end up suffering for it--which is most of them.

I bet it would succeed at keeping the spammers and scammers out, but I'd be leery of using it with a large group against a motivated adversary--if a single user exposes the share address (which is in a gray area between public and private) it seems like all of the users of that share are exposed. I'd prefer to see a web of trust so that an adversary has to compromise each hop on the trust graph before they find their target--but that's a lot of complexity for users to handle so I can see why keeping it simple might be worth tolerating the lack of granularity.

I certainly hope that something like this succeeds. It feels like we've lost the web and there are too many of us to coordinate en masse without something web-like--and at a time where that coordination is pretty important.

At a first glance, it sounds interesting though! identities being keypairs, files, content that is accessible via name...

Without some seed applications, it's hard to know if this actually works, or is just mental gymnastics.