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by geoah 1634 days ago
I'm strugling a bit with Skiff, I really want to like it but I don't understand what is actually private or decentralized about it.

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Their site says:

> Everything on Skiff is end-to-end encrypted. Your most sensitive data is private, decentralized, and truly owned by you.

According to a previous blog post [1] they claim they're using a key pair for identification, which they seem to be creating and controlling, and I can't find any mention to back it up, or provide my own in their UI.

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In their settings they also have a way to enable "decentralized storage through IPFS" but doesn't mention anything else and I don't understand what it does. It doesn't mention how files are stored, in which format, and how I can find their CIDs.

They go on to claim:

> Now, Skiff users can store files, static content, and more via the Interplanetary Filesystem (IPFS). Inside the settings page, users can enable or disable IPFS storage: Skiff users will be able to store files, static content, and documents fully decentralized on IPFS.

> In this model, all user data - still completely end-to-end encrypted - is viewable and accessible on a transparent ledger, instead inside a big-tech-owned database where it may be analyzed for advertisements and invasive analytics.

Not sure if they are calling IPFS a ledger, what they mean by transparent, and mainly how this stops them from analyzing your documents for advertisements and invasive analytics.

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Their whitepaper [2] is pretty much a product description and implementation overview. From a quick glance it talks about a centrally managed service that people need to talk to, doesn't describe any sort of federated/decentralized protocol or sync protocol, nor documents the CRDT events that make up the documents.

Their github org [3] doesn't seem to have any implementations or documentation of their protocol and how one could implement something that that talks with Skiff.

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I really really want to like Skiff, and if they hadn't mentioned "Decentralized" and "trully owned by you" I probably would like them even for being a Google docs competitor.

What am I missing? If someone could please point me to any docs/code around how any of their keypairs/ipfs/crdt/e2ee stuff work I'd really appreciate it.

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1. https://www.skiff.org/updates/skiff-decentralized

2. https://skiff-org.github.io/whitepaper/Skiff_Whitepaper_2022...

3. https://github.com/skiff-org