Hi! I’m a software developer working on a suite of collaborative self-hostable apps to replace proprietary services I couldn’t find a good replacement for.

I am writing this post to seek opinions and ideas now that I am still in the early prototyping phase, before it’s too late to change track.

My idea is to develop a collection of simple single-purpose apps that do one and only one thing. The first app will be called Simple Notes (mirror), a replacement for Google Keep. Every operation is encrypted locally on the client, and the server never sees plaintext data. I am investigating federations models to let users connect to other instances and work collaboratively, much like Lemmy.

So, my goals in order of priority are:

• No compromises on privacy and security
• Completely FOSS
• Real-time collaboration between users
• Asynchronous collaboration (work offline, sync when back online)
• One account to operate on all apps in this suite
• Web UI / desktop UI / mobile UI
• Minimal interface which my grandma can use, no feature-bloat
• No anti-features such as advertisements, tracking, etc…
• Self-hosting
• Federation

After Simple Notes, I plan to keep developing other simple apps, some ideas on my list:

• Simple Notes - Replacement for Google Keep
• Simple Split - Replacement for SplitWise
• Simple Chat - Replacement for WhatsApp/Slack/Meet/Teams
• Simple Docs - Replacement for Google Docs
• Simple Draw - Collaborative drawing app
• Simple Calendar - Replacement for Google Calendar

Initially I started writing my own protocol (mirror), operating quite differently from Lemmy’s, but then I realized that someone else already has developed a protocol for this purpose: Matrix. It is (optionally) E2EE, it’s FOSS, and it’s federated. So yeah, it sounds like the perfect choice to me. Also, if I pick Matrix, Simple Chat will just be a reskin of Element, so development cost is almost zero.

So, a questions for the developers on the Lemmy Selfhosted community: do you think piggybacking the Matrix protocol would be a good choice? Do you know any alternative that might be more suited for this purpose?

And a question for all Lemmy Selfhosted users: is there a simple app that you would like me to add to the list?

Bonus question: do you know of any Lemmy community where I could repost?

Thank you very much for the time you spent reading my post!

–

Link to source code on my server and GitHub mirror.