Cryptpad at HLB

[zeeclor]

@jdownie

I did get into CryptPad for a while, but it wasn’t really ready when i tried it out about two years ago. I liked the security of it, and i liked the self hosted apps too. It seemed like a fantastic alternative to Google Office. I remember that i had migrated a spreadsheet that i rely on into it, and it then got munged, so i had to roll back to a backup and play catch up on a month or so of updates, so if you go down that path, tread lightly. It was super cool though, so if it’s ready now i’d love to hear about it.

Following up on our discussions about collaboration with privacy I installed the docker version of cryptpad over the week-end. In cryptpad security is locked down, as you might expect, such that not even root or the admin account can access your unencrypted files.

It was a simple docker install, and by simple I mean that after stuffing around for a day and a half I eventually understood its format and requirements and got it to work.

Cryptpad incorporates some of the onlyoffice office suite. Onlyoffice permits AI plugins but these are disabled in cryptpad due to data leakage. You might be able to link up a local LLM, although I did not delve into that.

Anyhow if you want to take a test drive we have an instance running at HLB. It currently accepts new registration.

[Belfry]

Thanks for setting this up, @zeeclor.

I finally registered tonight and gave it a go (gradually catching up on my “HLB homework”). I uploaded a few de-identified “complicated” Word documents of mine to the HLB CryptPad and created a few fresh documents to give it a go.

With my brief play using Brave on macOS as the browser, it seemed to handle most of the basics really well, but struggled with some of the more advanced formatting in the complex documents I uploaded. Pages doesn’t get those documents 100% right either so that’s not a criticism of CryptPad at all. I had a similar experience with LibreOffice last time I tried it out (18 or so months ago?) and also with the web versions of Office 365 applications last time I tried those.

It was also very usable from a latency perspective, even though it’s hosted elsewhere and not a local instance or executable. Overall, I’m really impressed. I still need to give it a go on my home network and also see how the spreadsheet side of CryptPad performs. I’m still on the fence as to whether it will save me an Office 365 renewal later in the year, but it’s something I’ll consider, depending on how much I’m going to need to play nice with the other children (collaborate with users of real Microsoft Word) on an ongoing basis.