path: root/README.md

What is Shard?
===============

*WARNING:* This is a primer on what I want Shard to become. As of today I'm only
starting work on this project and there is almost nothing to see. I hope this
will evolve and approach at least a significant portion of the goals identified
below.

Shard is a decentralized communication system adapted to public and private
discussion and collaboration.

The system is based on distributed objects called "shards" of different types
that users share and collaborate on.

Shards are made to be usable offline or on small networks disconnected from the
broader Internet, with updates becoming synchronized automatically whenever
peers are able to communicate.


Shard compared to other systems
===============================

Shard is born from the synthesis of ideas already found in other networks, but
aiming to fix some of their shortcomings.

Shard vs. ZeroNet
-----------------

Just like ZeroNet, Shard will enable users to run public applications with
distributed collaboration. We wish to improve on ZeroNet in the following
significant manners:

- Full support for one-to-one and groupwise private communication and
  collaboration. Examples of such in ZeroNet are quite limited, for example
  ZeroMail enables user to exchange private emails but requires all peers
  participating in the ZeroMail system to store all messages sent by
  everyone. We want to make this work better by only requiring participants
  to store the private information.
- Collaboration on very large databases. We wish to be able to store big
  collaborative databases (e.g. wikipedia) in a distributed way, so that
  it can be run in a decentralized fashion without requiring everyone to store
  a full copy.
- Performance improvements. This is done by using a language that is by
  design well adapted to network programing with many things going on at once
  (Elixir/Erlang), as well as by optimizing our data stores to enable fast
  querying.

Shard vs. Secure Scuttlebutt
----------------------------

Just like SSB, Shard will enable users to work off grid and exchange data
when they happen to communicate. We wish to improve upon the following
aspects of SSB:

- More granularity on what peers store or not, by splitting a user's
  contribution in different "shards" that correspond to different topics.
  Users can still chose to replicate the shards that their friends use so
  that they have more options to synchronize and backup their data, but
  this is not required as it is in SSB where you have to replicate all the
  data of your friends and their friends.
- Decentralized discovery: we don't want to rely on centralized servers such
  as SSB pubs. We want to use DHT technology as a primary means of discovering
  new people and finding contents.
- We wish to be very general from the start, and not limited to social-media-like
  conversations.
- We want excellent support for one-to-one and groupwise communications.

Shard vs. Matrix
----------------

We aim to be much more general than a chat room, supporting collaborative
edition, file sharing, any kinds of databases, etc.

We also aim to work in a completely distributed fashion and not require
federation servers.

Shard vs. Mastodon / GNU Social
-------------------------------

Same remarks than for Matrix.