🆕 Software Suggestion | Peergos

[ianopolous]

Basic Information

Name: Peergos
Category: Private storage, sharing, social media and application platform
URL: Main site: https://peergos.org/
URL: Whitepaper: https://book.peergos.org/
URL: Source: https://github.com/peergos/peergos
URL: Hosted version https://peergos.net

Description

A group of us have been working on Peergos since 2013, initially in our spare time and mostly for free, though we won a grant from the EU Next Generation Internet group for 200k in 2020. We are aiming for a sustainable business model based on subscription for a hosted version. We strongly believe that the human right to privacy should be easy for anyone to exercise online. Our end goal is a privacy focused web, that works in existing browsers without extensions and protects ordinary people.

Right now, Peergos is an open source, peer-to-peer end-to-end encrypted storage, social and application protocol/platform. Its core is a global filesystem with identity controlled by the end-user and fine grained server-less access control. You can share things with friends on Peergos or via a secret link with anyone. We're building more applications on Peergos but we already have the following:

• photo gallery
• video and audio players
• text and markdown editor
• PDF viewer
• planning boards (kanbans)
• calendar
• social media
• private profiles
• easy web hosting directly from Peergos (no servers, DNS or TLS certificates required)

We support huge files - even streaming large videos in the browser (via service workers and writable streams), or downloading multi-gigabyte files direct to the filesystem.

A Peergos server is untrusted - clients verify everything they receive and and all encryption happens locally in the client. You can log in through any Peergos server. We go to great lengths to protect metadata (even from the server) including the following:

• file properties (name, modification time, mimetype etc.)
• file size
• whether something is a directory or file
• who or how many people have access to a given file
• directory structure
• your social graph

One of our 3 key criteria is convenience. That means an average non-technical user should be able to easily use it safely and securely. This has consequences: e.g. the user should never have to see a cryptographic key or hash, sharing should be a few clicks.

We have been audited by Cure53. It is 100% FLOSS both the clients and server (GPL and AGPL respectively). It can also be self hosted, and use either local disk storage or an S3 compatible block storage.

We operate a hosted server at https://peergos.net where free accounts get 200 MiB and paid "Pro" accounts get 50 GiB for £5 / month.

I'm very happy to answer any questions here.

Why I am making the suggestion

We have exited beta now and have been running in production for 3 years. We think a lot of people could benefit from using Peergos.

My connection with the software

I am a co-founder and project lead.

[ph00lt0]

I have seen this project some time ago in early stage. I must say I am really really impressed with the development!

It looks really great.

Just out of curiosity, do you have any plans for file/calendar sync options and contact storage? Would really be interested in such features.

[ianopolous]

Hi @ph00lt0, depending what you mean by sync, yes. You can mount a Peergos folder of yours natively using FUSE, and we hope in the future to support offline edits that sync later.

The calendar just stores standard ical files. If you mean something like a caldav server, then probably not as that would break the security model, though someone could easily implement one if they're okay with trusting the caldav server. Maybe we could support that kind of thing with a local server within the trust model...

[ph00lt0]

@ianopolous I've seen the mount option but I believe it would be more helpful to be able to edit the documents offline and not being depended on connection with the server.

We're getting a bit of topic for listing, my bad, but I guess it's an interesting discussion. Although security in mind, I believe no one is really going to use a calendar which they can't easily access on their phone. It would either require an native app or sync features. It is something that a lot of protonmail users also 'complain' about as the calendar can't be used effectively.

[ianopolous]

oh i just noticed, this is set as an issue, are you able to transfer this into a discussion?

How do I do that? Or do you mean open a new discussion and copy paste from here?

[ianopolous]

On the calendar topic, yes a native app would be great, it's just a matter of resources. Having said that, I currently use the calendar daily on my mobile using the web interface.

[dngray]

Discussion moved to https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/peergos-private-storage-sharing-social-media-and-application-platform/11825 as we're deprecating Github Discussions.