p2panda

A protocol for local-first applications

Website | SDKs | Specification | Contribute

p2panda is a user-friendly peer-to-peer protocol for secure, energy-efficient local-first applications. We want this protocol to be a playful tool for people to hack, build, play, and experiment with.

Handbook

Topics we're interested in

🦝 Browser Friendliness Lightweight clients that can easily be implemented as websites
🐢 Capabilities Fine-grained permissions and roles for users
🐎 Collaboration Data can be edited together, even when you are offline
🐮 Data Sovereignty Users own the data they create
🐄 Decentralisation No authority over data or how it is displayed
🦣 Deletion Some data does not need to stay forever, it can even delete itself automatically after some time
🐰 Energy Efficiency Data- and energy-efficient storage and replication
🐨 Identitites A user account model that gives people options for managing one or multiple online identities across devices
🐼 Local-First Access to online services without reliable and performant internet infrastructure. Independence from the corporate cloud
🦉 Privacy Secure encryption for sensitive and private data for users and all sorts of groups
🐧 Social Computers are used by humans
🐸 Warmth Computers make it easy to get carried away by their rigidly structured ways. However, every computer also contains an undeniable spark of pure chaos. We want to capture that spark to ignite a campfire for you to gather around and get cosy

Background

p2panda emerged out of activities around the self-curated zine BLATT 3000 (2014) and subsequent festivals VERANTWORTUNG 3000 (2016) and HOFFNUNG 3000 (2017), the latter of these being the catalyst for building a custom platform designed to help communities organise in a decentralised manner, also called HOFFNUNG 3000.

While exploring building a p2p festival platform we met many people from the communities around Earthstar, Secure Scuttlebutt, DAT / Hypercore, Cabal, Chaos Computer Club, Fediverse, Antiuniversity Now, Pixelache trying to understand how this technology affects the way we organise ourselves.

サービス！サービス！

This led to a group of people interested in realising a protocol for p2p communication, which ultimately should serve as a tool to build applications, like a festival tool and more. We've been meeting regularly on Mondays since 2019 to hack p2panda and have also been active in some other projects including the Liebe Chaos Verein, organising a p2p gathering and a reading group in Berlin. Obviously we're still going to organise another festival sometime 🐼.

Overview

SDKs

p2panda: Provides tools to write a client for the p2panda network. It is shipped both as a Rust crate p2panda-rs with WebAssembly bindings and a NPM package p2panda-js with TypeScript definitions running in NodeJS or any modern web browser.

Nodes

aquadoggo: GraphQL node server for the p2panda network running as a standalone application or Rust aquadoggo crate.

Clients

send-to-node: Minimal client to send data to a p2panda node
zoo-adventures: "Connect Four" Game. See it live under: https://p2panda.org
mushroom-app-tutorial: Tutorial Client to learn p2panda

Further links

C36C3 - Presentation at Chaos Communication Congress 2019
Shirokuma Cafe
Mio Ebisu - Cute panda graphics
Laura Weber - Cute panda illustrations

License

CC-BY-SA-4.0 License

Supported by

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme within the framework of the NGI-POINTER Project funded under grant agreement No 871528 and NGI-ASSURE No 957073

p2panda/website