Could it be folks are moving away from US-based businesses like Google? I read this with some interest:

As part of the UN Open Source Principles initiative, the UN has invited other organizations to support and officially endorse these principles. To collect responses, they are using CryptPad instead of Google Forms… If you don’t know about CryptPad, it is a privacy-focused, open source online collaboration office suite that encrypts all of its content, doesn’t log IP addresses, and supports a wide range of collaborative documents and tools for people to use. (source)

It makes me wonder if the UN move away from Google is due to politics. A query to Perplexity AI reveals this conclusion:

Google is unequivocally a US-based business. Since Trump’s 2024 election, there has been a marked increase in European businesses and governments seeking to reduce dependence on American-hosted technology services. This shift is driven by concerns over data sovereignty, privacy, and geopolitical uncertainty, and is reflected in legislative action, industry initiatives, and a surge in demand for European alternatives

I guess it’s not a big surprise that tools like CryptPad are coming to the fore again. They really do need some more funding, though.

CryptPad Revisited

Back in 2021, I explored CryptPad.

While CryptPad feels a bit clunky, there’s no doubt that a lot of value is available in the tools.

Markdown Slides

The Markdown slides, for example, makes it easy to create a slide-based presentation derived from Markdown formatted text. I created one for fun quite quickly. I do wish there were a way to take the next step and export it as an OnlyOffice presentation file.

Code View

Code view was also fun to work with, as I was able to view the markdown version of an article I was working on, and on the right side see a preview version. While it probably won’t cause me to give up my Joplin Notes editor as my primary workplace, it is an intriguing development.

Finally, Diagram view is easily one of the most useful tools. I wish either Code view or Diagram view would allow me to render mermaid syntax. That would give it an unusual edge, and I can’t imagine it would be too difficult a functionality to add.

mxGraphModel in Diagram View

One of the things I stumbled upon was being able to get AI to generate an mxGraphModel XML that I could copy, then paste into CryptPad’s Diagram view via the Extras Edit Diagram option (screenshot below):

I was surprised at the results. Using Gemini 2.5 Pro AI, I gave it this prompt for an existing conversation on a Socratic Dialogue one-pager I was working on:

Convert main ideas into a basic mxGraphModel structure representing main ideas with supporting details.

The result was astounding to me:

At this point, it’s easy to use CryptPad’s Diagram tools re-arrange (this was only two seconds of playing, imagine with more time) and export in variety of formats (PNG is what appears below with Light formatting):

The various colors are all Diagram’s choices. A little more experimentation, I have no doubt I could have made this more readable and easier to process.

Anyways, CryptPad seems poised to offer a lot of value. The clunky look can hide a powerful interface.