Founder here - thanks for posting this! It’s getting late where I am so everyone who has questions please don’t be shy to ask, will elaborate in detail tomorrow!
How does the mesh (zero-server) work under-the-hood? What are some example of applications you see being possible with this library? Your site also mentions either using a central server or not having a server. The first idea that comes to mind (perhaps because of your chat example on the homepage) is a decentralised P2P messaging app - something like Messenger or WhatsApp but is completely free from central servers.
The underlying protocol is peer-to-peer sync, so the mesh is really just a bunch of geographically distributed servers that sync between each other as needed and act as "one giant syncing & persistence peer" for your app - mostly so you can sync stuff between devices even if they're not online at the same time, and to use it like cloud storage (I like to call it "S3 for collaborative data")
On a high level, it solves a similar problem: a full backend so you mostly only have to write a frontend.
But Jazz does so in a completely different (local-first) way: it implements shared state on top of CRDTs and implements user identity and permissions based on public-key cryptography. This means you can create, store and share data from the client (even while offline) while still benefitting from cloud storage and real-time sync between devices and users by default.
What happens to the mesh if this doesn't work out as a commercial enterprise and the company behind it goes away? Practically speaking how much of it is running on your computer's today?
Well the version of the Mesh that we offer would go away, but the framework is open source as is a simple but fully functional version of the sync server, so you could somewhat easily host your own mesh. Not having lock-in here is super important for us
