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Florian Jacob

@florianjacob.dsn.kastel.kit.edu
131 followers 59 following 12 posts

Ph.D. student researching Security, CRDT.tech and Matrix.org. Part of the Decentralized Systems and Networked Services research group at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. dsn.kastel.kit.edu/staff_jacob.php

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Florian Jacob @florianjacob.dsn.kastel.kit.edu · 01/09/2026
Attending in person felt about as amazing to me as I imagine the iPad keynote must have felt back in the days, just the local-first grassroots hacker/maker/artist equivalent. 🥲 And when you think they have nothing left, they *repeatedly* pull out yet another amazing aspect of the new patchwork. 🥰
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Martin Kleppmann @martin.kleppmann.com · 31/07/2026
My talk at @localfirstconf.com is up, in which I argue that local-first has a role to play in improving the resilience of democratic societies in an era of geopolitical tensions. I'm pretty happy with how this talk turned out www.youtube.com/watch?v=--Ru...
youtube.com
Martin Kleppmann — Local-first in an unstable world
YouTube video by Local-First Conf
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Brooklyn Zelenka @expede.wtf · 22/07/2026
📃🐝✨ Excited to share a preprint about BeeKEM, a decentralized / local-first variant of MLS's TreeKEM (group E2EE) that we designed at @inkandswitch.com. Huge thanks to our coauthors for the writeup and empirical analysis — even we were pleasantly surprised by the performance results 📊
eprint.iacr.org
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Martin Kleppmann @martin.kleppmann.com · 10/03/2026
Adding “datacenter blown up by Iranian drone” to my list of distributed systems failure modes www.theguardian.com/world/2026/m...
theguardian.com
‘It means missile defence on datacentres’: drone strikes raise doubts over Gulf as AI superpower
Iran’s targeting of commercial datacentres in the UAE and Bahrain signals a new frontier in asymmetric warfare
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Martin Kleppmann @martin.kleppmann.com · 27/01/2026
PV solar panels produce about 20x more usable energy per hectare of land than growing biofuels ourworldindata.org/biofuel-land...
ourworldindata.org
Putting solar panels on land used for biofuels would produce enough electricity for all cars and trucks to go electric
The world dedicates a Poland-sized area of land to liquid biofuels. Is there a more efficient way to generate energy?
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Brooklyn Zelenka @expede.wtf · 22/12/2025
@patternist.xyz and I are talking about @automerge.org and Keyhive at @fosdem.org 2026 in the @localfirst.bsky.social room 🎉 If you're attending FOSDEM, come say hi! openlocalfirst.org/schedules/#4...
openlocalfirst.org
Open Local First
For the first time this year, the FOSDEM conference will host a devroom for Local First, CRDTs and sync protocols and sync engines. FOSDEM is the biggest Free and Open Source conference in Europe. Thi...
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pvh @pvh.ca · 04/12/2025
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Martin Kleppmann @martin.kleppmann.com · 27/11/2025
I am also gradually coming round to the view that interaction between humans/client apps and (perhaps multiple) AI agents is a state synchronisation problem that probably needs CRDTs lucumr.pocoo.org/2025/11/22/l...
lucumr.pocoo.org
LLM APIs are a Synchronization Problem
Maybe the LLM message APIs should be rethought as a synchronization problem.
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Florian Jacob @florianjacob.dsn.kastel.kit.edu · 18/11/2025
With our talk “Eventually Consistent Access Control: Practical Insights on Matrix from Decentralized Systems Theory”, we were at the @matrix.org conference 2025 in Strasbourg: media.ccc.de/v/matrix-con... [m]@🇫🇷🥳 The talk covers scientific foundations as well as 6 years of our own research on Matrix.
media.ccc.de
Eventually Consistent Access Control: Practical Insights on Matrix from Decentralized Systems Theory
Access control is the core of any system's security, but usually provided by a single, centralized server. However, access control in a M...
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Florian Jacob @florianjacob.dsn.kastel.kit.edu · 11/11/2025
Our paper “To the Best of Knowledge and Belief: On Eventually Consistent Access Control” is now available as CC-BY: dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/... At the example of @matrix.org, we showed traditional conceptualizations of access control as insufficient, and present eventual consistency as alternative.
Pittsburgh at night
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Martin Kleppmann @martin.kleppmann.com · 03/10/2025
It took almost two years…! The Fugue paper that @mweidner.bsky.social and I wrote about interleaving in collaborative text editing algorithms was finally accepted by IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems paywalled: ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/111... free: arxiv.org/abs/2305.00583
arxiv.org
The Art of the Fugue: Minimizing Interleaving in Collaborative Text Editing
Most existing algorithms for replicated lists, which are widely used in collaborative text editors, suffer from a problem: when two users concurrently insert text at the same position in the document,...
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pvh @pvh.ca · 16/10/2025
New Automerge website at automerge.org. Kudos to @spiralganglion.com and @seaofclouds.com for their work building it. The level of craft and detail in the landing page is very satisfying.
automerge.org
Automerge
Automerge is a library for building collaborative, local-first applications.
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Florian Jacob @florianjacob.dsn.kastel.kit.edu · 22/05/2025
Our paper “Proof-Carrying CRDTs allow Succinct Non-Interactive Byzantine Update Validation” dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/... is the first to combine CRDTs with non-interactive cryptographic proofs. They match very well, performance is good for non-critical tasks. Implementation: github.com/kit-dsn/proo...
dl.acm.org
Proof-Carrying CRDTs allow Succinct Non-Interactive Byzantine Update Validation | Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on Principles and Practice of Consistency for Distributed Data
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Florian Jacob @florianjacob.dsn.kastel.kit.edu · 07/04/2025
Our newest paper, “ReP2P Matrix: Decentralized Relays to Improve Reliability and Performance of Peer-to-Peer Matrix”, is now available under CC-BY: dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1... Code and data based on the existing peer-to-peer @matrix.org prototypes available as well: gitlab.kit.edu/kit/tm/telem...
dl.acm.org
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Florian Jacob @florianjacob.dsn.kastel.kit.edu · 09/01/2025
My research group hosts this year's ROBUST 2025 workshop on Byzantine fault tolerance and state-machine replication, and seeks your participation and contributions! We look for 25min presentations, including preliminary results and open question. See you on March 17/18! gi-robust.github.io/robust25/
gi-robust.github.io
ROBUST 2025 Workshop @ KIT Karlsruhe, Germany — March 17 and 18, 2025
Resilient Operations - Byzantine Fault Tolerance and State-Machine Replication
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Florian Jacob @florianjacob.dsn.kastel.kit.edu · 21/12/2024
I was guest in the new German episode of the #Matrix Salon Podcast, talking about my research on the (de)centralization of the Matrix server network and my journey to @matrix.org 😊 Episode: open.spotify.com/episode/34th... RSS feed: anchor.fm/s/cdb34188/p...
open.spotify.com
Florian Jacob - Matrix Conference 2024
Matrix Salon Podcast · Episode
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Carlos Baquero @xmal.bsky.social · 27/10/2024
Here is an excellent and modern introduction to CRDTs. dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...
dl.acm.org
Approaches to Conflict-free Replicated Data Types | ACM Computing Surveys
Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs) allow optimistic replication in a principled way. Different replicas can proceed independently, being available even under network partitions, and always co...
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Florian Jacob @florianjacob.dsn.kastel.kit.edu · 23/09/2024
The #MatrixConf has left Berlin 🇩🇪, for now. I love to scroll through the photos in the Matrix guest book everyone created together at the closing, the conference had such a nice vibe. 📸 See you all again in France, October 2025! 🇫🇷👋
A yellow, empty Berlin subway train at an empty platform, doors open, everyone has already departed to Berlin central station.
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Florian Jacob @florianjacob.dsn.kastel.kit.edu · 21/09/2024
The first ever #MatrixConf is going great, so many people, ranging from researchers to practitioners, companies to government organizations. 😄 First time I heard from the Matrix efforts of the Swiss post for a nationwide communication system, especially for B2C cfp.matrix.org/matrixconf20... 🇨🇭
Matrix conference logo sprayed on the floor, open portal to the conference venue in background.
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Brooklyn Zelenka @expede.wtf · 05/09/2024
🎉 I'm super excited to share the first post giving a high level overview of the local-first access control project that we're working on at Ink & Switch! 🐝✨ www.inkandswitch.com/beehive/note...
inkandswitch.com
Beehive lab notebook: Local-first access control
Local-first access control
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Martin Kleppmann @martin.kleppmann.com · 06/09/2024
The latest Ink & Switch Dispatch features some projects dear to my heart: collaboration for research papers, and local-first access control for end-to-end encryption www.inkandswitch.com/newsletter/d...
inkandswitch.com
Provenance for science papers, local-first access control
In this Dispatch, we'll introduce you to two new projects at the lab: exploring writing environments for science papers and local-first access control. We also have some updates on WASM packaging for ...
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Florian Jacob @florianjacob.dsn.kastel.kit.edu · 24/04/2024
Our newest paper, “Logical Clocks and Monotonicity for Byzantine-Tolerant Replicated Data Types”, is now available under CC-BY: dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/... We formalize @matrix.org and other autonomous decentralized systems based on hash chronicles to verify monotonicity and Byzantine fault tolerance
dl.acm.org
Logical Clocks and Monotonicity for Byzantine-Tolerant Replicated Data Types | Proceedings of the 11th Workshop on Principles and Practice of Consistency for Distributed Data
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