What is Earthstar?
Earthstar is a small and resilient distributed storage protocol designed with a strong focus on simplicity, and the social realities of peer-to-peer computing kept in mind.
Earthstar is an offline-first database. Earthstar stores all data directly on your device, so that reading and writing works even without an internet connection.
Earthstar is a key-value database which supports author versions. Earthstar databases store arbitrary data, keyed by two pieces of information: a free-form path and a public key identifying the author. So a single path like /wiki/flowers may hold revisions by multiple authors.
Earthstar data is mutable. Earthstar lets you delete or overwrite the data you have created, but no-one else can.
Earthstar databases can sync. Earthstar databases can by synchronised so that changes from many users and devices can be combined into a reconciled state.
Earthstar databases are private. Earthstar databases do not announce their presence to the world. Only people who know a special identifier can learn of their existence from another peer and replicate their data.
Write access is restricted by a second identifier, so it's possible to grant read-only access to a database.
Earthstar works in the browser. The JavaScript implementation of Earthstar has been designed with standard Web APIs and a pluggable architecture which lets it use APIs exclusive to certain environments, one of them being browsers.