My devlog is a series of posts that document the development process of Nowlte, a graph knowledge base that uses MLS for E2EE collaboration. It is currently in nightly and is developed on a private repository in the meantime.

Introduction

Real-time collaboration is a fundamental aspect of knowledge sharing with current apps like Notion, Obsidian, Logseq, and others. I use them all the time both personally and professionally.

It has often come up to me however, that using that these apps often come at a compromise between security and collaboration. I can’t really share my Logseq database to have a real-time collaboration session with my friends because the app just didn’t implement it yet. Otherwise, Notion on the other hand, isn’t really the app I’d dig for security. (Notion is headquartered in San Francisco, California, USA. 🙂)

While I figured I may have a Mémoire to write for a Masters degree this year, building a collaborative graph knowledge base that would ensure both end-to-end encryption and encryption at rest was suddenly a good idea. Obviously, in an open-source fashion.

And voilà, say hi to Nowlte! 🦉

Nowlte Guarantees

When speccing Nowlte with @superdarki, we envisioned the following guarantees:

• Graph data model: Being a dear Obsidian user, arranging my knowledge into a graph allowed me for a while to organize my life and work in a neat way.
• Convenient UI: Nowlte provides a user-friendly interface that makes it easy to create, edit, and share knowledge. Although the graph is there, the experience is seamless if the user is coming from a more traditional product like Notion.
• End-to-end encrypted in transit, and in rest: All communication between users is encrypted using MLS. This article will sum the choice made here.
• Open-source: MIT First and foremost. It is, as mentioned previously, a potential Mémoire topic and the opportunity to learn while sharing a soon-to-be incredible app with the rest of the world. It allows auditability and everyone to use it for their own good.

The rest has to be written. Until next time, adventurer!