// the take
midgard is a self-hosted, end-to-end-encrypted clipboard sync tool: a SwiftUI menu-bar app for Mac, a Go daemon for Linux/Windows, a web page for phones (plus iOS Shortcuts), and a relay server that passes sealed blobs between your devices without ever holding the key. It's for developers who want Universal-Clipboard-style sync across mixed OSes without handing copy/paste history to a cloud vendor.
The threat model is actually sound, not just marketing: the relay numbers and forwards encrypted blobs and only buffers them in memory until every device has acked, so a server operator genuinely can't read your clipboard. Device pairing via QR/code handles the symmetric-key exchange problem properly instead of punting it to manual config. There's real test coverage across the pieces that matter (relay, store, pairing, auth-hardening, e2e) rather than just unit tests on leaf utilities. Self-hosting is practical: docker-compose is written to join an existing Traefik network rather than assuming it owns the box.
The LICENSE file is just "Copyright ... All rights reserved" with no actual open-source grant, despite the repo inviting issues and PRs — legally ambiguous for anyone wanting to fork or redistribute it. Sign-in is hardwired to a third-party identity provider (auth.latere.ai) run by the same author, which is an external dependency and single point of failure for a project whose whole pitch is self-hosting, and there's no documented way to point it at your own OIDC provider. The relay's in-memory-only buffering means a server restart while a device is offline can drop that device's pending clipboard entries — there's no durable queue. It's a one-maintainer project with 228 stars, and "iOS support" is a web page plus Shortcuts rather than a native client, so that path is noticeably second-class.
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →