Glossary

Every term these docs lean on, one line each. The French column is for bilingual teams and conference talks.

Term	Français	Meaning
local-first	local-first	The reference copy of the data lives on the user’s device; the network only syncs their devices.
replica	réplique	One device’s complete copy of the data.
converge	converger	Fold the other replicas in until every device holds identical state.
merge	fusion	The deterministic operation that reconciles two replicas.
conflict	conflit	The same record was changed on two devices that had not seen each other.
last write wins (LWW)	la dernière écriture gagne	The record (or field) with the later clock is kept; the losing side is journaled, never silently gone.
tombstone	pierre tombale	A dated “this was deleted” marker, kept so a replica that missed the delete cannot resurrect the record.
Hybrid Logical Clock (HLC)	horloge logique hybride	A stamp made of wall time, a counter and a device id: a total order that survives clock skew.
clock skew	dérive d’horloge	Device clocks disagree with real time and with each other.
deterministic	déterministe	Same inputs, same result, on every device, in any order.
idempotent	idempotent	Applying the same merge twice changes nothing.
CRDT	CRDT	Conflict-free Replicated Data Type: a structure whose copies always merge cleanly. selfstore’s sets are CRDT-style; live text needs a sequence CRDT (Yjs, Automerge).
snapshot	instantané	The whole dataset (JSON collections plus binary files) as one unit - what a backup contains.
durable home	emplacement durable	The storage the user owns (a disk file, Drive, WebDAV, S3) where the encrypted backup lives and devices meet.
end-to-end encryption	chiffrement de bout en bout	Data is encrypted on-device; the storage only ever sees ciphertext.
key derivation (KDF)	dérivation de clé	Turning a passphrase into an encryption key slowly on purpose (Argon2id), so guessing stays expensive.

The deep dives behind these words: How sync works, Security model, The backup format.