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Comment by daliwali | Hacker News Reader

This is my first time reading about Edsu, it seems very similar to the Solid Platform in one important aspect: it keeps data in the control of the user, separate from applications.

I like how low-level and simplified the protocol is, being limited to only 9 types of messages. Compared to Solid which carries baggage from RDF, this seems far easier for third parties to implement.

The note-taking app is really under-selling the protocol beneath it. What could help sell it better is by doing something better than a centralized platform can.

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Thanks! One of the goals of Edsu is that it's simple enough that you can "telnet" in and just talk directly to the server like you can with HTTP or SMTP. It can seem like a trivial feature, but I've found that being able to speak a subset of a protocol from any language after just an hour or two of duct-tape hacking ends up being a big unsung feature.

And itgoon has it right - this was the most useful thing I could think to write that only took a single day (I had an self-imposed deadline to hit earlier this week).

Here's a discussion of more interested projects and how Edsu could be used in each (and its advantages and disadvantages):

https://edsu.org/use-cases/

Edsu seems to have some similarities to https://remotestorage.io . Can someone summarize the main differences?

This is the first I've heard of Edsu as well, but when I checked out NoteToMe, the first thing I noted is that you should create an account first. It's probably not inherent to the protocol, but the nice thing about RemoteStorage is that the default library already starts with localStorage first, and allows you to only sync that data to an account later.

Compare https://litewrite.net, a RemoteStorage app presumably similar to NoteToMe. You can start writing immediately, and sign in with a RemoteStorage account only if you want that data to be available elsewhere as well.

From a quick look through remoteStorage, it looks to me like it's is focused on storage (and so appropriately named!), while Edsu is more explicitly a foundation for applications.

One place this shows up is that Edsu has a permissions model where other people can read and interact with what you've stored (within very tightly defined parameters), which is the basis for writing multi-user apps like, say, a distributed Reddit or Slack.

They both have the same model regarding the ownership of data though. The biggest difference there is that Edsu uses a Merkle tree as the storage, like IPFS and git, which has a lot of consequences in terms of how it gets used.

I agree, the protocol looks pretty neat. I wonder what the hold up is on Linux support. I love me some FreeBSD, but Linux is better supported.

The note-taking app seems more like a proof of concept than any kind of category-killer, though.

I'll be keeping an eye on that protocol, though.

It's only because FreeBSD is my desktop OS, and so I used kqueue during dev. I understand that there's a compatibility shim for Linux, so theoretically a port should be quite easy. The bulk of the code is in Rust, and that shouldn't need porting at all.

And thanks for the kind words :)

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