I just posted a project update video for Keydex that shows the current features and future plans. Plus an announcement that I'm renaming the project from Keydex to Horcrux! Check it out:
I've been quiet lately but I've just been very heads down trying to get Keydex ready for it's first alpha usability test, which I'm about to head to right now! I'll try to post a project update this week, as I passed the halfway point on my (relatively tight) 4 month timeline recently.
I just did a weird thing with gift wraps in Keydex and I want to make sure it's not dumb. I'm having a bug where lockboxes are showing back up on the devices of key holders after they have been removed. Like this:
1. Alice invites Bob to be a key holder for their lockbox
2. Bob accepts
3. Alice publishes a shard of the lockbox data for Bob to download, gift wrapped and addressed to Bob.
4. Bob changes their mind and deletes the lockbox from their device.
5. Later when Bob reopens the app it downloads the shard event again and recreates the lockbox.
Of course I could maintain some local state about what has been deleted, but it would be better to just nuke the shard from the relay. We could ask the original publisher to do it, but we can't guarantee they are online. So what if we just include the ephemeral key used to gift wrap the shard in the seal? Now Bob can publish a NIP-09 deletion request to delete the shard.
I could see this being useful in other places too. For instance you could have a type of direct message that gets deleted from relays as soon as it is downloaded by the recipient.
Fun milestone for Keydex today: I had my first successful restore of data. I was able to fire up several copies of the app and create a lockbox, break it into shares, distribute them to peers via Nostr, initiate recovery, approve the recovery request, and reassemble the data.
There is still a ton of work to do but having the core flow working makes all the future changes feel small and incremental by comparison.
Keydex is going to be the first Nostr app I'm aware of that uses relays exclusively to relay data from one peer's device to another, not for long-term data storage. I'm going to use NIP-40 expiration tags on all events so that they only live on the relay for a few days, which makes Keydex closer to a peer-to-peer application that uses Nostr as the transport (and identity) layer.
I'm thrilled to share that I'm receiving an OpenSats grant to work on social key backup and a new Nostr groups/communities app. I'll be building both in the open and this account will probably get filled up again with posts about that work.
I think one of the primary things the world needs right now is to move our social sense-making out of big social media platforms and back into community spaces that reflect our values. I'm so blessed to have the opportunity to chip away at these social/digital problems for a while longer.
My intention is always to build in solidarity with folks who need these tools most. If you're interested in using these sorts of tools and want to help - I'd love to do an interview with you! Send me a DM or reply to this note and I'll be in touch.
