Thanks to everyone who attended and made this such a great conversation.
Rosano took more extensive notes but unfortunately lost the data (!), and would encourage participants to summarize their thoughts in the comments.
Participants
- Alexander Cobleigh works on cabal peer-to-peer chat (like Slack but no account and no server).
- Geoffrey Litt works on Wildcard for customizing apps without programming, using an excel-like interface; and with Ink & Switch on Cambria for distributed schema evolution.
- Michiel de Jong has worked on protocols like Solid, and remoteStorage, as well as the closely related Unhosted movement. He could be the grandfather of zero data, but to feel less old he points to Tim Berners-Lee who wrote a prior post on separating data from apps in 2009.
- Rosano works on various zero data apps like Hyperdraft and Launchlet.
- Sebastian Kippe works with 5apps, which provides static hosting and remoteStorage accounts; and Kosmos, which develops decentralized collaboration patterns and software.
Discussion
Naming is important because it enables ideas to be meme-able.
We talked throughout about schemas and the challenges of defining and standardizing them. TLDR: start using Cambria.
How can we increase adoption? What is the selling point for developers? How much easier is it to build apps? Can I use a library to enable my app to become the next Figma for X? What’s the selling point for people using apps? What features does it enable? Rosano points to doorless apps that can be used with less friction, without creating accounts; collaborative features like being able to share access and collaborate in real time; using an email address as the storage identifier so that people can use pathways to enter a new world.
In the Solid world, Noel de Martin, Vincent Tunru, and Jackson Morgan are making some of the more popular apps, such as Media Kraken for tracking movies, Notepod for taking notes, Poddit for bookmarking, and Liqid Chat for discussion stored on pods. Some challenges include (“many people with opposing views trying to change the world together”) and (“linked data not being easily interoperable in practice”)—see Michiel’s comment below for more details.
Alexander asks about remoteStorage…
- How different is the remotestorage.js API from
localStorage
? More or less the same (“get”, “set”, “delete”), even though it uses IndexedDB. You can use it to add sync to browser-based and offline-capable apps and tools. (Zero Data can even be thought of as a way to separate data from localStorage apps so that people can see their data). - Can you self-host the data? The more modern servers in Rust and Node.js might not be production-ready. php-remote-storage has more testing, production-use, and is easier to get started—although it is an older implementation, the spec hasn’t changed drastically.
Geoffrey might have access to research funding for people working on these kinds of issues.
Next event
To hear about our next gathering, watch this space or subscribe to the mailing list:
What do you think?
Reply with a comment and share your perspective.