Fission Fragments is our weekly links roundup, that has been on hiatus ... for a while. We're going to get back to weekly, usually Wednesdays, and will be posting in the forum. You can also subscribe by email.

Alcro, an Electron competitor that uses Chrome devtools and websockets

Via @bascule, we found out about Alcro:

Tony “Abolish ICE” Arcieri 🦀

@bascule

Alcro: a Rust library for building desktop apps using web technologies by leveraging an existing installation of Chrome (rather than shipping the entire Chromium/Blink engine for each app like Electron)
github.com/Srinivasa314/a…

18:50 PM - 21 May 2020

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Tauri Studio - An Electron competitor that uses webview

Found via the bascule Alcro Twitter discussion, Tauri is another project to build native desktop apps with web technologies. It features a Node based CLI and a Rust backend, although the project aims to be polyglot:

Today, Tauri uses Rust for the backend - but in the not too distant future, other backends like Go, Nim, Python, Csharp etc. will be possible. This is because we are maintaining the offical Rust bindings to the webview organisation and plan to let you switch out the backend for your needs. Since our API can be implemented in any language with C interop, full compliance is only a PR away.

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Git LFS with IPFS Support

As part of some ongoing research, @ellttBen found an implementation of Git Large File Storage (LFS) integration with IPFS, sameer/git-lfs-ipfs.

This has given us some good ideas of how to integrate a git-based development workflow with IPFS and Fission.

Binary files of all kinds can be stored with your git repo, but then transparently stored in IPFS, rather than checked in and bloating the size of your repo. This could be particularly interesting for large photos, videos, and in general media files and assets.

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Slack vs Discord vs Discourse: the best tool for your community, Orbit Blog

Our friends at Orbit (you know, makers of the Orbit Model of Developer Engagement, also in our forum) wrote up a giant community platforms blog post that’s a really good summary of pros and cons to help you decide Slack vs Discord vs Discourse.

We’re on Discord and Discourse, and also use it for our private / internal company spaces, too, which isn’t really covered in the Orbit post. We’ll get around to writing up our story at some point!

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Anil Dash, CEO of Glitch, says we need "Yes Code" rather than "No Code"

At the beginning of May, Anil posted No Code is great, but here's why we need Yes Code to LinkedIn.

We believe in a lot of these same concepts at Fission, along with additional step of making it so that users can own their own data, which should make it even easer to hack and remix apps and websites.

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I want to own the database that my apps use, Grant Orndorff

Speaking of things we believe in and owning user data, Grant's post about how he envisions users owning the data of apps they use is very similar to what we're building at Fission. He covers SOLID and Urbit and how they're not quite what he has in mind.

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Fission Updates

Brooke explains her design of UCAN, a user authorization method that doesn't need a backend, that we're implementing at Fission:

User Controlled Authorization Networks (UCANs) are a way of doing authorization where users are fully in control. OAuth is designed for a centralized world, UCAN is the distributed user controlled version.

This week's video chat is with Qri, an open source version control and sharing system for datasets, built on IPFS -- join us Thursday, May 28th, at 9am PDT / 12noon EDT / 1800 CEST.

Fission is building a web native file system, plus tools to build & host apps with user controlled data, encryption, and local first software. This makes it easy for front end devs to build great apps without worrying about backend or deployment.