Real-time collaboration on a server that cannot read your notes

Nectenda is an Obsidian plugin for editing the same notes as someone else, at the same time, with live cursors — where the server relaying those edits holds only ciphertext it has no key for.

It is not released yet. There is no signup, no download and nothing to buy. This page exists so that the licence notice compiled into every build resolves to something honest.

What makes it different

Obsidian Sync and the alternatives to it can read your notes. That is not an accusation; it is how they work, and it is what makes their server-side search and web access possible. Nectenda makes the opposite trade.

Your notes are encrypted on your device, with a key derived from a password the server never receives. Note titles are HMACs rather than paths, so filenames do not reach us either. What the server stores is an append-only log of encrypted updates and the metadata needed to route them.

You can check that, rather than believe it

The plugin ships as readable JavaScript — the exact file that runs is the file you can inspect, at .obsidian/plugins/nectenda/main.js. There is no compiled binary and no reproducible-build problem to argue about. Every release carries the SHA-256 of that file, and the source it was built from.

The security model states what the server can and cannot see, names the code implementing each claim, and says plainly that if the document and the code ever disagree, the document is the bug.

This site is part of that. It ships no JavaScript at all, and says so in a Content-Security-Policy you can read with curl -I https://nectenda.com. Nothing we serve over the web will ever ask for your password or touch your keys — enforced by the browser rather than promised in a page.

What it does not claim

It has not been audited. It is designed to be — the whole point of publishing the client is that the encryption can be checked — but no external review has been carried out, and saying otherwise would be the kind of claim this project exists to avoid making.

It does not hide metadata. The server can see that you have an account, who you share folders with, how much you store and when you were connected. Traffic analysis is real, and end-to-end encryption does not solve it. If that is what you need to protect, run the server yourself — it holds no keys either way.

Losing us costs you nothing

Obsidian is local-first and so is this. Your notes stay on your disk as plain markdown files. If the service stops, the prices change, or you simply leave, your vault is untouched.