Wondering if anyone here has opinions on or even experience with Earthstar. It seems to claim to enable local-first software in the browser. Coupled with a user-friendly language such as Lua, it could be the basis of a nice malleable system based on the Web.
Earthstar looks like an interesting effort! I haven’t tried it yet myself… Are there any example projects based on Earthstar available to try out somewhere…?
There’s a tutorial on building a chat app, which can be considered an example project. I haven’t found anything else.
The Earthstar folks are lovely! I closely follow their subsequent work on Willow (which Earthstar will eventually use):
Had a partial attempt to help foster some practical interest in building applications on Earthstar by doing live screen shares with the project lead on Discord (unfortunately my code isn’t well documented although it’s relatively simple if you’re familiar with JS):
Had other things come up and plus their focus on redesigning the protocol kind of put things to a halt though, but definitely feel like it’s one of the more promising efforts in the space!
Even just the way they implemented the specs site is really thoughtful and lovely 
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Hmm. Much like Earthstar, at a first glance the Willow Protocol seems… rather complicated for what little it specifies. “3D-range-based set reconciliation”? Why exactly do we need “subspaces” when we already have hierarchical paths? Perhaps I’m missing something but I don’t exactly get a sense of “I could pick this up and implement it in an afternoon”.
that’s fair! I generally get the same impression about its complexity, but given its goals and my experience working in the same space it tries to address (i.e. working with peer-to-peer data models for offline/local-first applications), I think it’s trying to address important challenges (in a more thoroughly spec’d way)
I would suggest reading some of the pages listed in https://willowprotocol.org/more/index.html#more, which provide some nice higher-level explanations and context. They just announced finishing the specs for the protocol and added lots more to the site, so maybe that will give some more clarity.
P.S. Sorry for the tangent to Fengari in this discussion. This will be my last post not related to Fengari 
Happy to open another more relevant discussion thread if anyone’s interested in talking about it
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