Is skm the right tool?

skm is for the app where “we cannot read it” is the feature.

The 2026 sync-engine field is crowded and good — ElectricSQL, PowerSync, Zero, InstantDB — and almost all of it syncs plaintext through a server the vendor can read, because that is what server-side search, notifications, and AI features need. If you want those, use one of those. They are better at it.

Use skm if:

• your data is health, legal, financial, journalistic, or otherwise the kind where “our server was breached” is an ending rather than an incident;
• you want a local-first app whose reads never wait on a network;
• you are prepared to give up server-side search, server-side notification content, and server-side anything-that-reads-the-data.

Do not use skm if:

• you need full-text search across a corpus larger than a device holds;
• you need the server to compute over the data (analytics, ranking, LLM calls);
• your compliance story requires server-side inspection of user content.

A short honesty checklist, all of which is expanded in SECURITY.md:

you want	skm gives you
the server cannot read record contents	yes — the primary claim, tested mechanically
the server cannot forge a record	yes — signatures inside the ciphertext
the server cannot tell who wrote what	yes
the server cannot tell who talks to whom	no — membership and pairwise graphs are visible
the server cannot serve stale or omit records	no — not yet; needs a signed log. See ROADMAP.md
a browser app nobody can backdoor	no — whoever serves the JavaScript could ship a leak

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