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subScribe

subScribe is a writing suite you own. It has documents and book publishing, boards, and notes that work on your own device with no account and no connection. When you want to write with other people, it adds a self-hosted server for chat, voice, live sessions and shared documents. One of you runs the server (one click, inside the app) and everyone else connects to that address. Nothing touches a third-party cloud: what you write lives on your device, or on the server you and your friends run.

Open the app and you're at Home: start a document, a board or a note, pick up what you were last working on, or join the people you write with.

What's inside

  • Documents: a word processor with a ribbon, named styles, tables, footnotes, a table of contents, sections, headers and footers, page setup and a page view that matches the printed page. Write with others live, suggest changes, comment, and go back through every version. Manuscript, screenplay, stage play and poetry formats set the page for you
  • Word and PDF: Word files open and save with their formatting and tracked changes. PDFs are typeset by the app, with tags for screen readers and an archive format. A PDF can be imported back into a document
  • Check: an editing pass over the whole text. It finds what is inconsistent, holds the text to your house style, and reports on repeats, sentences, dialogue, word choice and pace
  • Books: a manuscript becomes a paperback interior, an EPUB and a submission manuscript, with a cover editor for the printer's sheet
  • PDF editor: reorder pages, mark up, fill in forms, sign and change text in a PDF, without converting it
  • Writing sessions: WYSIWYG prompts (formatting + images), optional timers and live side-chat, with everything recorded and browsable forever
  • Chat: Discord-style groups with channels, markdown, custom emotes, @mentions and #channel references, image uploads, slash commands
  • Voice and video: channels over peer-to-peer WebRTC (the server only relays signaling), with per-device input/output settings
  • Canvas: shared storyboards with stickies, shapes, colored frames, connectors, images, sketches, link cards and live document references
  • Notes: an Obsidian-compatible local vault with [[wiki-links]] and notes you can share with friends
  • Plugins: every feature is an app on an internal platform, and you can add your own (see Plugins)

Documents, books, PDFs, boards and notes need no server. Presence status (online/busy/invisible), profile cards, and native notifications for DMs, mentions, sessions, and shares round out the day-to-day experience on one.

Security in one paragraph

Connections use TLS 1.3 with hybrid post-quantum key exchange (X25519MLKEM768) and the server proves its identity with an ML-DSA-65 signature pinned on first connect. If a server's identity key ever changes, the app warns you loudly. Passwords are stored as PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA-512 hashes. Login tokens are opaque and revocable per device. Details in the repository's docs/crypto.md.

Start with Setup.