Two months after writing about how we should have peer to peer data sync for contacts and calendars, I stumbled upon a project called DecSync CC on F-Droid.
It maps data (calendar, contacts, rss, map favorites) to a collections of text files specifically arranged to avoid conflicts when synchronizing them.
However, the main dev hasn't pushed any commit since 2022.
He must have gotten tired of maintaining alternate storage plugins for radicale, evolution, multiple feed readers ..
It was a beautiful idea.
But I think it's an incredibly hard task to keep all sorts of external apps synced this way.
Maybe the solution is to build simple, basic apps based on this sync logic, that would work both on mobile and desktop.
It might be easier to build a simple app and keep it simple, than to keep a plugin up to date with an app that's constantly evolving.
Those apps could actually be paid because of such a unique value proposition, even if the kind of people that want a p2p system for their personal life data are probably not going to be interested in a closed source paid app.
It's easy to start a cool project. It's hard to keep it running and up to date for years without pay. It's even harder to find a way to make it truely sustainable.