A peer-to-peer phonebook for data hoarders. Find people who collect what you collect, see what they have, and reach them directly — with no account to sign up for and no company server in the middle.

Hoardbook is a small desktop app. You write a short profile, publish a catalog of your collections, and hand your share code to the people you want browsing it. They add you as a contact, page through your catalog in a familiar two-pane file viewer, and message you directly. Everything runs over the public Nostr network, so there's no Hoardbook server that can go down, get seized, or quietly own your data.

It's the phonebook to Qurator's "club": Hoardbook finds and verifies people and shows what they have; the richer social layer lives in Qurator.

Current release: v0.9.6. Works standalone. Identity is a single key you also use across Qurator and the wider Nostr network. Hoardbook handles introductions and catalogs only — the actual file downloads happen in a separate companion app, Mascara.

• No accounts, no central server. Your identity is a key you generate on your own machine. There's no email, username, phone number, or signup — and nothing for an operator to lock you out of or hand over.
• You decide who sees your catalog. Your collections are published encrypted. A bare public key lets people follow you and see a teaser; your share code is what unlocks the full catalog — give it only to people you trust.
• Browsing keeps your location private. Looking at someone's catalog reads from a relay and decrypts locally — it never connects you straight to them, so peers don't learn your IP.
• Find people by what they collect. Tag your collections by interest and search across the network for others who match. Save a search and get notified when a new matching person shows up.
• Direct, private messages. Message any contact end-to-end encrypted. Relays can't read your messages or even tell who sent them.
• Built-in defense against impersonation. Every contact gets a local nickname and an at-a-glance word-and-color fingerprint, and Hoardbook warns you when a stranger shows up wearing a contact's name. You never have to eyeball a raw key.
• Stays current on its own. Publish a collection and Hoardbook re-publishes the catalog automatically when the underlying folder changes.
• Portable, encrypted backups. Back up your whole identity behind a passphrase and restore it on another machine. Lose the key without a backup and the identity is gone — so back up early.
• Lives in the tray and updates itself. Closing the window keeps you online in the background; updates are signature-verified and applied on the next restart.

1. Generate your key. Hoardbook creates your identity locally on first launch — no signup, no server.
2. Add your collections. Point Hoardbook at the folders you want to share. It publishes an encrypted catalog (folder tree, item counts, sizes, tags, notes) — never the files themselves.
3. Hand out your share code. Post your public key anywhere so people can follow you; give your share code to the people you actually want browsing your catalog.
4. Discover and connect. Search by interest tags, browse catalogs, add contacts, and message them directly.
5. Download with Mascara. When you want the actual files, the Mascara companion takes over the transfer. Hoardbook itself moves no files — it ends at "here's who has it and how to reach them."

Hoardbook is pseudonymous, not anonymous, and it's honest about the line:

• Catalogs are encrypted to your share-code holders — the open network only ever sees ciphertext.
• Browsing never exposes your IP to a peer — it's a relay read plus a local decrypt.
• No single point of control — Hoardbook uses a spread of public relays by default, and no one of them is authoritative.
• What a relay can still see is your public key and your connection's IP, the same as any server. If you want to hide even that, route through Tor or a VPN, and keep a separate key for Hoardbook.

Prebuilt Windows binaries are published with each release. Linux is supported from source; macOS is planned.

Prerequisites: Rust (stable), Node.js 18+, and the Tauri v2 prerequisites for your platform.

git clone https://github.com/Arsinine/Hoardbook
cd Hoardbook

# Run the test suite
cargo test --workspace

# Desktop app — dev mode (hot-reload window)
cd crates/hb-app/ui && npm install && cd ../../..
cargo tauri dev --manifest-path crates/hb-app/Cargo.toml

# Desktop app — production build
cargo tauri build --manifest-path crates/hb-app/Cargo.toml

Hoardbook talks to public Nostr relays out of the box — there's no relay of its own to run.

By default Hoardbook spreads across public Nostr relays (relay.damus.io, nos.lol, relay.primal.net). You can add or swap relays in Settings → Relays (only wss:// is accepted).

Want to run your own? Use any off-the-shelf Nostr relay — strfry or nostr-rs-relay — add its URL to your relay set, and you're done. There's no Hoardbook-specific relay software to maintain.

Hoardbook is one of three companion apps that share a single identity:

• Hoardbook — the phonebook. Find and verify people, browse their catalogs. (this repo)
• Qurator — the club. Rooms, reputation, and the richer social layer.
• Mascara — the courier. The one app that actually moves files, kept separate on purpose.

Issues and pull requests are welcome.

Released under the MIT License.