Holochain Powers Local-First Software

Holochain is a tool for local interaction at global scales.

Why do the work documents that you share around an office need to be stored on a server hundreds of miles away? How do emergency services communicate when a disaster knocks out the connection to the internet? Does my team's message board really need the global cloud?

What is the Internet?

At its most basic level, the internet is just computers networked together. But as it’s grown, it has come to rely on huge communication infrastructures and the cloud, with data centers stationed around the globe. This has enabled the internet as we know it, but what happens when a piece of that puzzle briefly fails? Most modern applications cannot work without talking to a central server to coordinate data between users. You might be able to bypass the default settings for Google Docs to work offline, but that doesn’t let you edit live with someone else on the same LAN.

Local Networks (Shouldn’t) Need Global Internet

Local Area Networks (LAN), Mesh Networks, and other infrastructure like local servers and LANs that are networked together for say, a hospital or university, are all examples of internet protocols that are localized in some way.

So we can network computers locally, but most applications don’t work on this scale. If you are at the office and the internet connection goes out, you should still be able to use the office Slack to chat with colleagues in the next room over who are also using the office wifi. But you cannot.?

Holochain Allows Local-First Interaction

Because Holochain applications function peer-to-peer and thus don’t rely on a central server, the application’s network scales to whatever devices are actually able to connect at that time. This means that if you can form a local connection over whatever networking protocol you share, from Bluetooth to TCP/IP, then you can interact with the people in the next room.

+ Local Data-Integrity

Central servers grew in part from a need for security and data integrity. Central servers provide this security via firewalls and the rules of the software at both the server and application levels. For instance, we trust Slack’s servers (and the company itself), to ensure that only those supposed to be able to read from and post to a particular workspace have that access, avoiding spam or data collection by bad actors.?

Holochain uses framework level validation rules to secure the integrity of data and application level membrane rules to control access. All of this is done on a peer-to-peer basis, so you can act locally and securely.

Resyncing with the Global Internet?

So you can interact locally, but what happens when you connect back to the internet as the whole??

Holochain applications are always designed with the assumption that the total network state is unknown, working directly with the network nodes connected at any given time. This means that they can always scale up and down as different parts of the network come online.

Holochain also includes provisions for local data caching so that you can save key pieces of global data in local stores in case of network interruption.?

Holochain Apps: Local-First, Global Coordination

Holochain applications are made to work at any scale. Working from a local-first basis, they work perfectly well at the level of an office or a town, but they also function for distributed teams and national governments. Because they are infrastructure agnostic, and don’t require central servers to hold user data, they can fluidly scale based on use and connectivity.?

Use Case: Disaster Response

There are numerous applications for technology like this but one example where it is critical is disaster response. Whether a hurricane, wildfire, earthquake, or any other disaster that disrupts communication infrastructure, it is important to have local forms of communication, data collection, and sensemaking. Emergency services setting up mesh networks so that they can run incident command units and supply disaster relief is an obvious implementation. Usually emergency services are limited to radio, which remains a powerful technology, but has its limits regarding the amount and type of data that can be transmitted, as well as access control issues for more sensitive data.?

Further, if Holochain applications and mesh networks are implemented in communities prior to a disaster, then local individuals won’t necessarily be cut off from each other despite the infrastructure failures. As different parts of the network reconnect directly to each other, neighbors can check on each other and coordinate locally. This also means that when emergency services connect to those network fragments, they have an already established pipeline for communicating directly with residents.

We see this technology as an opportunity to empower local communities in the face of disaster, enabling volunteer efforts like the Cajun Navy which has been instrumental in many hurricane relief efforts.?

Read More and Connect

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