With the release of the new and improved Sharing Center I want to talk about privacy and data ownership in general for a moment. From day one, a "privacy first" approach was the most important thing to me in Chronicle Keeper. I want everyone who uses it to know, as the owner of their own data, that this data is safe. The Fellowship laid the first cornerstone for that. Now, with the Sharing Center, you can share a lot of content with your Fellowship without publishing your own files.

Where privacy starts in Chronicle Keeper

The foundation is that every Realm is its own separate database. Only the owner gets a connection into that database. This does not have to stay that way forever. I can imagine that publishing single pages one day, so people can read along in your Realm, could be a nice feature. But one thing matters most to me: nothing should ever be written into a foreign database by accident.

Your content is edited only by you, as long as it is not synced through a share. This logical separation of the databases is not always the easiest road for projects like this. Most projects create one big database and mark the owner on each row. If you then forget to limit a query to the owner, you suddenly have all the data, or the data of other users, in front of you. That cannot happen in Chronicle Keeper. The data simply does not sit together.

AI and privacy

Of course Chronicle Keeper also has some AI features, and that is a privacy question on its own. The easiest thing for privacy would be to run an AI model on my own server. But anyone who has ever tried to run an AI model on their own machine knows that it eats an enormous amount of resources, unless you want to wait all night for an answer. The really good models will not run on your own computer at all.

So I decided to go with an external provider that guarantees privacy. In this case that is OpenAI, a company many people know through ChatGPT. Many also use its API, and OpenAI explicitly lets you turn off any tracking and any reuse of the API requests. There are providers where this option does not exist, or that simply have little credibility. For my account at OpenAI these options are turned off. And to be extra safe, every Realm also has its own OpenAI credentials, so there is no way for usage to overlap by accident here either.

Wherever it is possible, I try to separate data access logically or technically so that no accidental crossovers can happen. That is exactly the thought that led me to the idea of the Fellowship in the end.

The Fellowship as the base

The Fellowship is the base of every content share. You actively decide who belongs to it, and your chosen friends, fellow players, or co-creators have to actively decide for it as well. One side hands the other a link, the other side opens it and can accept the invitation. There will be no "user directory" and no way to search for other users. You have to actively talk to each other to connect.

This connection is the base for sharing content. You can share all of your content from the Compendium, either one by one or as a bundle. While you do that, you can see transparently which fields are shared and which are not. In the end, sharing is again just a link. I could think about making single Fellowship members directly selectable, but for now I like the idea that the whole process needs some active communication.

Copy or sync

Once you have handed the link to your companion, they can decide whether the content should be saved as a sync or as a copy. They have to fill in the fields themselves that are not shared. Those are mostly the things that live on their own in every Realm and get adjusted there: categories for images and documents, the date, or types for entities. Every Realm should keep its own order.

A copy is a one-time action. As long as you have not pulled the link back, the process could be repeated, but the content that was already taken over will not be overwritten. For the other case there is the sync. Here a connection is created between your content and the content of the receiver. Unlike with a copy, the receiver cannot edit their synced content themselves. Every change you make is then presented to the owner of the linked content for review, and has to be accepted explicitly after they can look at a comparison. That sounds like a lot of work, but it makes sure that no unwanted changes to content happen.

Cutting connections and keeping transparency

Throughout this whole process it stays possible to cut connections at any time. Share links only work as long as you are in a Fellowship together. Even without a personal breakup, each side is always able to end the share. Either you stop handing out changes, or you stop listening for changes. And for transparency, you can always see who has pulled your shared content.

In the end I hope it is worth building the process this way. I want to keep control over my content at all times, and if that is true for you as well, then this flow hopefully fits you too. If not, you are very welcome to reach out if you have ideas about where the process could be shaped a little better. Feel welcome in the Discord to talk about it. After all, I am interested in finding a flow that fits everyone.

So is that all? No, absolutely not. Fun fact: for one of my characters I write a little diary after every session with my friends. Naturally I want to share that too, but not by creating a new link every single time. I am lazy, and I do not want to bug my Dungeon Master with a fresh link over and over. So there is the option to put together a content bundle. That bundle is not final: you can remove content from it or add new content at any time. What goes across the table in the end is still just a single link.

That way I can keep writing my diary after every session, and since every entry is its own document, I add it to the bundle right away. My Dungeon Master gets a notice that a new document is there, and can take it from the bundle into his game master Realm whenever he has the time and the mood.

But now that really is it. A small trip into the topic of privacy in Chronicle Keeper and an introduction to the new content shares. In your user menu you will now find the new link to the Sharing Center, and I am looking forward to hearing what you made of it, or whether there is still something that would make it more useful for you.

Have fun!