Stop syncing everything

I didn't go into the implementation details so I won't comment on that, but I will say that this is a really important problem to solve. I've long wanted/needed an agnostic sync layer that apps could use to sync my changes across clients and servers, and it would be great if app developers didn't have to put any work into it, they'd just point their database to a URL and the database would take care of all the syncing.

This means that the app developer could support private syncing without any effort, and I wouldn't have to pay a subscription just for sync, I could just run a sync server on my NAS and all apps would know to sync their data with it. Of course, app developers don't want this because subscriptions are a reliable income stream, but hopefully users would push for it.

~10 years ago, CouchDB was the answer to this problem. I don't know what the status of that is in 2025, but at the time it was used to e.g. sync airplane sales tablets with a central database once they were back on the ground and online.

Yeah, what happened to CouchDB? I thought it would be much more popular, but I haven't heard of it in years. Maybe this problem isn't actually important, or maybe people don't know they can solve it in this way?

Not an expert on CouchDB, but used it recently in a project and loved the syncing with the corresponding pouchdb at the frontend. My main problem, what was missing imho was security: Interactions with couchdb where directly with the database, ie no intermediate API available. Maybe that was a good idea when couchDB was designed, but it made me feel uncomfortable in 2024. If anyone knows of an intermediate API-Layer for couchdb, please post.