Musings

At the Heartwood Chapel of Camp Navarro, where internet was intermittent, but connections were bountiful— a discussion began in a local-only, offline-first, serverless-multiplayer fashion.

Peer-to-Peer (p2p) has always been a wicked problem. Who can trust who? Should you trust me? Should I trust you? The peers discussed.

A factor in the challenge of trusted p2p applications is the size of the information being stored. When data is replicated across peers, the minds quickly fill up— or rather, phones run out of space.

Beyond that one axis though, could there be multiplayer applications where all peers have access to collaborative information across time and space?

The peers set to find out. Going round by round, each listing off the applications they use daily, their collective inventory had been taken.

Each application was quickly evaluated— would this still be useful for a closed-network of peers and will the data fit in the storage of each peer?

Slack? Yes. Closed Network. Email? No. Too federated. Wiki? Maybe. Context dependent.

Calendars? Photos? Notes? Blogs? Yes, yes, yes, yes.

At this point the peers collectively wondered, “What is the best way to tackle exactly this problem for collaborating on this blog post?”