P2Panda
The What
p2panda aims to provide everything you need to build modern, privacy-respecting and secure local-first applications.
We have adopted a modular approach—allowing projects the freedom to pick what they need and integrate it with minimal friction. We believe this approach contributes the most to a wider, interoperable p2p ecosystem which outlives “framework lock-in”.
p2panda is a very multifaceted project: We maintain our Rust crates, apply for grants, design protocols and do research in radically distributed data-types. We organise community events and write peer-to-peer applications with our friends and collaborators.
For What
We want to see more local-first applications, as usually data doesn’t need to be owned by third-parties and software rarely needs “global scale”.
Our focus is primarily on providing application- and p2p protocol developers with building blocks for realizing their ideas, for example: p2p networking, sync protocols, gossip overlays, group encryption, access control etc.
At the same time we’re collaborating with various local communities, edge computing companies and open-source developers to build local-first applications. Through these processes we’re establishing best practices and identifying design patterns which emerge from the work. All of the projects have slightly different needs around privacy, efficiency and consistency and we hope to develop guidelines to inspire other developers in their approach toward application design.
Like this we do not only try to contribute code but also help with forming a more general understanding of how we can approach building distributed, collaborative software without always relying on the internet.
THE REACH
We’ve been exploring code, UX and UI patterns for GTK-based applications with a group of developers from GNOME and together will release the first GTK-based, collaborative, local-first text editor. Our second collaboration has been a project developed together with HIRO, a company based in the Netherlands. Together we designed and implemented a solution named “rhio” to sync large files and messages between micro data-centers in a fully distributed manner. This collaboration is an ongoing effort to integrate p2panda into a larger edge micro data-center software stack used within the EU.
Last Autumn we started working on an autonomous coordination toolkit with a new team of six people, supported by the Innovate Creative Catalyst Programme in the UK. The goal of the project is to develop a mobile and desktop app for collectives, organisers and venues to share resources and organise events in a shared calendar. This tool has been a very old goal of p2panda and it feels incredibly special to have the release of the first prototype scheduled for Spring of 2025!
p2panda is part of a universe of p2p projects (e.g. Earthstar, TinySSB, Willow, DeltaChat, Iroh, NextGraph, Braid, Cabal and Secure Scuttlebutt), UX designers and privacy advocates, with whom we constantly share our ideas and research.
THE MILESTONES
The NGI Pointer programme kicked off the development of p2panda in 2020 and since then we’ve received further support through variants of the NGI ecosystem.
This year we’ll also be working on an NLNet NGI Zero Entrust grant to integrate UCAN-based access control and secure group encryption with Post-Compromise-Security and optional Forward-Secrecy, based on research into decentralised secure group messaging algorithms. Our plan is to implement these as Rust modules which you can pull into your application, independent of p2panda, your choice of data types or networking stack.
Together with researchers we’ll be publishing our work on fork-tolerant and prunable append-only logs, hopefully in the form of another blog post or even a paper.
Lastly we will be releasing the GTK-based text editor in collaboration with GNOME and the first version of the autonomous coordination app (name still pending) and hopefully organise a festival with it sometime!
