ADR-0002 — No user accounts

• Status: accepted
• Date: 2026-10-17

Decision

Parallaxe has no user accounts, mandatory or optional: no sign-up, no login, no identity server run by the project.

Rationale

Local-first and privacy by design are core principles. An account system would add a server to operate, personal data to protect and a dependency on the network — for no benefit to the MVP.

Consequences

Future features such as file sharing, shared network storage or a browser extension must work without accounts. Directions to explore, each in its own future ADR:

• Sharing: capability links — end-to-end encrypted files with the key in the URL fragment, never sent to a server, with expiry and download limits; or direct peer-to-peer transfer. The declared license travels with the asset.
• Identity without accounts: a key pair generated locally per device when a group needs to recognize its members.
• Network storage: a network folder is just another root. The SQLite catalog stays local to each machine; sharing annotations would go through an export file, not a server.
• Browser extension: talks to the local desktop app (native messaging), not to an online service.