Thoughts on Fileverse?

Questions
1

Hi,

I’m sure some of you will have heard of this relatively newcomer to the scene. They claim to be a decentralized and privacy-oriented collaboration suite. But I couldn’t find any discussion or review of them on here.

Would love to hear some expert opinions :slight_smile:

Thank you

3

The website itself does not appear to be self-hosted has dependencies on questionable crypto websites and Google fonts. No mention of anything being open source. Nextcloud + OnlyOffice seem highly preferable at the moment as they are true FOSS self-hostable projects that have been around for a long time.

4

Fileverse · GitHub they do link their Github on their website. They do seem to be open source no?

Also, how do you discover these dependencies? I’d love to ask them about them. Cause, besides Cryptpad (which is also built on OnlyOffice afaik) they seem to be a good and much needed contender to Google Suite

And from my experience, Nextcloud and selfhosting setups wouldn’t work for vast majority of people.

5

Also, how do you discover these dependencies?

NoScript, uBlock, uMatrix (and other tools) will show what third party requests a website makes. A lot of websites do it, but it doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence in privacy claims.

6

Nextcloud and selfhosting setups wouldn’t work for vast majority of people.

Not everyone has to run this on their own computer; the idea is that organizations such as companies, universities and schools each run an instance for their own needs (possibly along other things such as email or a Matrix instance).

7

Could you give me examples of these dependencies? I tried to look for them.

8

@Tux any luck?

9

I will try to not be too harsh on my review but given the main author’s profile it’s nothing more than:

  • hype hype hype is the main goal of the projects, very founder mindset that’s about “SHIP FAST!”
  • latest tech in the Web dev space too, shipped at light speed and with the goal of making a lot of noise on Twitter, not sure about how sturdy and mindful they are about long-term stability
  • from a purely developer POV, I am not sure if it is fully slope but looking at the dDocs.new packages, there is nothing very sturdy and project will probably just be dead in 6 months when the maintainers are bored of this current project

Overall, nothing really interesting to see here that could be taken more seriously than any random over-the-weekend kind of project that is based on memes and vibes.

Tried my best to be nice with the above paragraph. :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

10

Hey all thanks for using and asking about Fileverse dDocs and dSheets!

I only just noticed this conversation, let me share some more information and correct some false claims shared in the last comment, which you can all easily verify independently as well.

Fileverse is an end-to-end encrypted workspace and collaboration protocol. It is open source and built to be a sovereign technology that stands in contrast with the Cloud-based alternatives (e.g., Google Docs/Sheets and Microsoft Word/Excel) that over 3 billion people rely on despite their lack of strong privacy and user control.

Fileverse currently includes the dDocs and dSheets apps which are both almost at feature parity with Google Docs and Google Sheets in terms of speed and features (e.g., suggested edits, granular permissions, tabs, version history, collaboration). They also come with unique features and guarantees that are worth mentioning here since y’all are fellow privacy folks:

  1. On top of e2e encryption by design, we also have additional privacy layers for multiplayer collaboration. When you invite collaborators to your documents or spreadsheets, their email addresses are kept private from Fileverse. We use Verifiable Oblivious Pseudorandom Functions (VOPRFs) + Zero-Knowledge Proofs to enable this and have applied the same logic to account social recovery. Our open source work has also been independently audited. GitHub - fileverse/voprf-server · GitHub
  2. Your account / files can be recovered via social recovery instead of some relying on Fileverse customer service and arbitrary verification rules. You can set two people (their email addresses) as your “guardians” so that if you ever lose access to your account or your email gets compromised, these two people can cryptographically recover your files and ability to decrypt them without having to ask the Fileverse team anything. Even your guardians’ email addresses are kept secret from Fileverse using the same VOPRF+ZKPs logic as above.
  3. But much more importantly, if Fileverse or the team goes down, peers that are using our apps will still be able to “force exit” their data and retrieve all the content that is theirs. You can test it yourself here: walkaway dot fileverse dot io. You can also self-host this page or access it via its .onion address for more privacy.
  4. You can also host your own collaboration server if you want to avoid using Fileverse’s ‘dumb’ servers used for edit collaboration with peers.

Now, to quickly correct the guesses of the previous comment. No, that is not the main author of Fileverse, the person linked was a developer that joined our team for a year. As you can see for yourself on GitHub, Fileverse’s codebase was active prior and post his contributions. We are very intentional about how robust we want Fileverse to be before coming out of beta. This Wired article about us was published last month, hope it can put some colour to what I am sharing here. Please click translate at the top: Ο Έλληνας που θέλει να απεξαρτήσει το internet από τη Google

Yes, we ship fast. I’ll give you that!
We are a small but feisty ship and are obsessed with the idea that a Internet users globally deserve better than having their most valuable data and accounts in the hands of a couple companies and Cloud services that refuse to give them end-to-end encryption and full control over their digital life. In fact, the parabolic propagation of genAI throughout online services has made us even more convinced that our thesis is correct. We need mass privacy and verifiable technology now more than ever.

As such, we want to make privacy and sovereignty HYPER ACCESSIBLE. We’re not re-inventing the wheel in terms of UX, we want to make the switch from eg Google Docs to Fileverse dDocs as simple and intuitive as possible while giving people better guarantees for their digital lives.

I will stop here so as to avoid making the answer too long (already is haha) but please feel free to ask any questions you might have or share any feedback for the apps! Fileverse got to where it is today thanks to relentless community support so I’m always happy to hear more :slight_smile:

  • Andreas from the fileverse 𓊝
11

The force-exit option is probably one of the more interesting parts for me. With privacy-focused services, being able to recover your data even if the company disappears is a really important safeguard. I’d still want to see how it holds up with long-term use, though.