[j-berman]

Hi HN,

Hush Docs is an offline-first, private Google Docs alternative. You can turn off your internet and the site works totally fine. Your docs are stored in your browser (using IndexedDB/Dexie.js), so you can create and edit your docs whenever you want, no internet or account needed. If you decide you want to sync across devices - or collaborate with others on a doc - you can create an account (which you do need internet for). Your docs are then end-to-end encrypted, so no server ever has access to your plaintext docs! Docs stay in sync using CRDTs (Automerge) - collaboration should be smooth even if someone works on a doc while offline for a while (like on an airplane with no wifi). Code is 100% open source. [1]

I decided to create this because someone asked for a tutorial on how to create offline-first apps using Userbase, which is a developer tool I’ve helped work on to make it easy to create secure and private apps [2][3][4]. I started out with a super basic tutorial, and then one thing led to the next and ya know: Hush Docs. A basic tutorial on how to build something like Hush Docs with Userbase is coming! [5]

Hush Docs is super barebones, so I’m calling it a "demo." If there's serious interest, I’d happily put more time into it and get it into something more production ready.

For reference, here are a couple other sweet E2E encrypted Google Docs alternatives I came across while scoping this out:

https://cryptpad.fr

https://www.airborn.io/

Airborn did something especially cool worth pointing out: they used a service worker to guarantee that code loaded into the browser came from the latest GitHub commit. [6]

[1] https://github.com/j-berman/hush-docs

[2] https://userbase.com

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22145168

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25869472

[5] https://userbase.com/docs/

[6] https://blog.airborn.io/post/2017/08/03/Transparent-Web-Apps...

[londons_explore]

I have built products where user data is stored in the browser...

It inevitably leads to angry users when they hit the "clear cookies" button without realising that will delete all their documents...

It makes it pretty hard to use the browser for any offline use case when the user's expect their data to be persistent, yet don't understand that clearing history/data deletes the data...

Before long you'll be forced to sync the data to a server.

[j-berman]

There's also a challenge here where browsers will literally just start deleting data from IndexedDB if a user starts running out of space on their hard drive.

I added this statement: "Keep in mind this is a demo app subject to change in the future. You can download your docs at any time." as a warning to anyone who might be using this site with expectations that the data will be persistent.

Ultimately I figure the only solution for a production app is to either do a better job educating users on these issues, or scrap the offline persistence selling point entirely (and just rely on it as a cache).

What did you end up doing with your products?

[londons_explore]

I ended up syncing the data to the server, and emailing the user with a "magic link" with the decryption/auth keys in.

To begin with I didn't store the encryption key, but too many users lost the original email, so now I also store the user's encryption key, which is lame from a privacy point of view, but for most users is what they expect.

[j-berman]

Got it.

Not sure if this was clear here, but when you create an account on this site, the docs do sync to a server automatically. The encryption key is derived from users' passwords (Userbase handles that part). This way if users lose their locally persisted data, so long as they still have their password they're good to go (or vice versa). It's only if they lose both that they lose their data.

But still, given your experience, it does sound like it would be challenging to sell an exclusively offline product using browser storage. Appreciate the insight.

[blitblitblit]

Very cool! One issue with this is, depending on your security slider setting, this does not work in Tor Browser and presumably Firefox. In Private Browsing mode IndexedDB is apparently restricted, so it is only working in non-private windows for me, and of course JS must also be enabled.

[j-berman]

Ah yes! Good point. Could work on a fallback for when IndexeDB isn't present :) It's probably still rough around the edges