gplaces VS CryptPad

~$ sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends -y git gcc libc6-dev make pkg-config libssl-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libidn2-dev libidn11-dev libmagic-dev ~$ git clone --recursive https://github.com/dimkr/gplaces ~$ cd gplaces ~$ make PREFIX=/usr CONFDIR=/etc ~$ sudo make install

For me, the best small side projects involve some kind of porting (between protocols, OSs or CPUs), contribution of a fix for a visible but mysterious bug, or revival of codebases in bad shape, especially when they're unfamiliar and written by others. You can learn a lot from a software engineering culture that's different from yours or small, feasible projects that allow you to understand the bits and bytes of something unfamiliar in a fun and useful way. These projects are great to develop flexibility and general problem solving intuition. And getting familiar with the 20% of an idea, a protocol, a programming language, etc' that's used 80% of the time in real-world use cases, is often enough.

https://github.com/dimkr/gplaces (Gopher -> Gemini port)

In my frustration with MS Office, I gave it a chance and searched for MS Office alternatives ... and found https://github.com/cryptpad/cryptpad ! Looks quite nice. Maybe I should set that up on a server.

https://cryptpad.org/

There's a public instance in France to try it out.

CryptPad provides a full-fledged office suite with all the tools necessary for productive collaboration.

I discovered these 3 amazing projects recently:

Cryptpad, essentially google docs/sheets/forms e2e encrypted. It does include collaboration. https://github.com/cryptpad/cryptpad

Immich, google photos self hostable, with share options https://github.com/immich-app/immich

Nginxproxymanager manages certificates and proxies to self hosted stuff through nginx https://github.com/NginxProxyManager/nginx-proxy-manager

Great self hosting stuff!

I work for XWiki SAS. Two products we develop have it:

- XWiki, a extensible wiki platform, experimentally [1] but soon to be fully supported

- CryptPad [2], an end-to-end encrypted collaborative platform. And actually, CryptPad was accidentally born as a first attempt to have this feature in XWiki.

[1] https://extensions.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Extension/Realti...

[2] https://cryptpad.org/

Hey, very happy to see you so enthusiastic!

I'll be sure to transmit your feedback to the CryptPad team.

I'm not an expert myself so while I might know some stuff, it'd be better to talk to them directly.

Come say hello on the Matrix #cryptpad-general channel [1], don't hesitate to open issues on the bug tracker, and to browse the CryptPad's website [2].

[1] https://matrix.to/#/#cryptpad-general:matrix.xwiki.com

[2] https://cryptpad.org/

https://cryptpad.org https://cryptpad.fr

It's not LibreOffice, but while revisiting CryptPad (which I thought was a multiplayer notepad like etherpad or codimd, except with an encryption key in the url fragment identifier) I was impressed to see that they're expanding to become an entire office suite. You get a WYSIWYG editor (I'd rather wish for markdown but ok), spreadsheet editor, survey forms, and more which I don't remember, all live like google docs but (as I understand it, I didn't audit it) end to end encrypted between the users. It's a bit sluggish because everything has to happen on the client side, so it's a lot of JavaScript, but after the page loads it works smoothly. You can self host it as well, there's a list of instances somewhere on https://cryptpad.org with the official instance being https://cryptpad.fr

LibreOffice has a ton more features and is way harder to port. Case in point: I was at an open source conference where LibreOffice proudly demo'd their new server version, saying it used mapnik. Me, confused, asked huh why'd you use an OpenStreetMap rendering library? Turns out they basically run the ancient C++ UI on the server and make a VNC-like connection and that map tiles is the easiest or fastest way to load the screen. At least, that's what I remember from that presentation, I haven't looked into that madness further, but that's LibreOffice online...

Currently I'm looking at https://cryptpad.org/. But maybe there is an alternative that sucks even less?!