// the find
PatWie/drafft-ink
Effortlessly self-host whiteboards. High-performance, cross-platform digital whiteboard with live collaboration built in Rust & WebGPU. Zero subscription, AGPLv3-licensed.
A self-hosted infinite-canvas whiteboard built in Rust with WebGPU rendering via Vello, real-time collaboration via Loro CRDTs, and a single-binary server. Targets developers and teams who want an Excalidraw-equivalent without handing their diagrams to a SaaS. Ships as a native desktop app or WASM for the browser.
The tech stack is genuinely interesting: Vello for GPU-accelerated 2D rendering is the right bet for performance at canvas scale, and Loro is one of the more serious CRDT libraries available right now. The crate split is clean — core, render, app, server are separated properly rather than one 10k-line file. Inline LaTeX math in a whiteboard is a real differentiator for technical users. The collaboration server is a single binary with no config files, which is exactly the right UX for self-hosters.
517 stars is still very early and the docs stop at 'run cargo run'. There's no deployment guide, no TLS setup instructions for the collab server, and no mention of persistence — unclear whether the WebSocket server survives a restart with existing boards intact. WebGPU support is still gated behind flags in some browsers and absent in most enterprise environments, so the web target has real compatibility holes today. Export is PNG or JSON only — no SVG output means you can't take your diagrams anywhere that expects vector graphics.