[christiansakai]

I've been thinking to create a desktop app for family uses. Like, family photo albums, notes, precious documents, and more ambitious projects, maybe passwords? My relatively big families are scattered throughout a few different countries and homes.

I am a fullstack web dev so creating web app or electron app is right up my alley, but not in distributed databases or peer to peer stuffs.

I was looking at OrbitDB the other day, but I'm curious can it be programmed to just connect peer to peer to my family computers ip addresses?

Also, as far as I know, I can't upload blob data to OrbitDB, and has to use IPFS instead. Can this syncthing solves this problem?

Or more generally, is there any OSS software that already solves this problem? I'd love to learn how to build it.

The whole system doesn't need to be high performance, it is just for family uses.

[rakoo]

It sounds like you want Nextcloud (https://nextcloud.com/athome/) or cozycloud (https://cozy.io/en/features/). Both are servers you can self-host, and mobile/desktop apps to make it more integrated.

[rolisz]

You might want to check out Tailscale. They create a WireGuard based mesh VPN between all your devices, enabling secure communication between them. So you have one central DB and then all the other devices connect to it.