I think you might be looking for “local-first” software. Many of these are based on CRDT replication. An elixir based one is https://electric-sql.com/

Also, a recent talk:

Hey @tj0, author of elixir-desktop here. “local-frist” was also my initial read your the question:

For a local first application there are many ways to sync data with others but two obvious ones are:

1. Star topology with a single server somewhere
2. Peer-To-Peer mesh topology without any centralized servers

Using standard Elixir tooling (and elixir-desktop) it is really easy to archive 1. - You can have your local copy of the data that is needed when the client is not connected in a local SQLite database, this is also what the desktop-example-app is doing and then when you’re connected you can call your server API to fetch new data or upload data.

For 2. which is definitely more involved we (my company) developed an elixir library that allows creating end-to-end encrypted connections between any two peers on the internet. GitHub - diodechain/diode_client_ex: Elixir SDK for the diode network · GitHub it’s pretty low level and exposes raw :ssl streams. So I can’t really recommend this for high productivity at the moment.

CRDTs are probably the future here, especially for mesh networks but from the top of my head I’m not aware of a library that I could point you to there.

Hope this helps a bit,
Cheers!

In theory this is surely possible. It’s TCP connections between nodes.

In practise clustering is not build for that usecase. Most importantly there’s no security boundries between clustered nodes. But also Node naming can become tricky with various networks involved. By default beam clustering uses a full mesh, so all the desktop apps would want to connect to each other as well (just just to servers).