#buildingrhizo — Public Fediverse posts

This week in #BuildingRhizo: started writing the technical docs after @siwek built a beautiful home for them.

The big challenge is the audience split: security people want their specific questions answered before they trust or touch code, and engineers who know *some* crypto but still need to understand what makes an encrypted app different from a normal one.

I’ve now read dozens of sites, some books, papers and most explainers are either too simple, sound like marketing speak, or assume that knowledge from somewhere and quickly throw you off a cliff of understanding. (Does good material like this even exist?)

Trying to write something in between, something that won’t lose either audience in the first five minutes but still rewards you with knowledge if you stick around and let your brain go weird a little.

We spent a lot of this year building an end-to-end encrypted app that we call #Rhizo (short for Rhizome).

It’s been in our heads for years and we’re finally getting to the stage where it’s about to escape into internal testing and validation.

Rhizo is built for when a secure group chat stops working when trying to organize something, and the only alternatives are often paid corporate tools; some secure, some not, and some where the ownership/values “ick” is real for people we talked to.

We’re a few months from being out of the early infrastructure weeds, which means it’s still very early BUT there’s finally something worth sharing instead of just building (which often looked like key and identity talks during toddler naps and late night coding for @siwek).

Beyond open sourcing it this year, the next big step is making all the technical documentation public and legible so other people can look at it, poke the thing, and maybe contribute code, ideas, words, etc.

While I’m here, I’m also coopting #BuildingRhizo so I can look back on it and remember it one day (when we’re older and sleeping more).

Onwards, and looking forward to any ideas, questions, suggestions and even intros or tagging people who might need it and we should meet on this journey!