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Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud

blog.acolyer.org

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Re: Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud

#151

Post by Jareddd »

Awesome write-up! This brings me back to early 2000's when we we typically owned most of our graphic design software. Yes it was expensive but, there was barley any "cloud" features added and if you wanted a new version you simply had to download the update or simply keep the software you were currently using.

My team and I have taken the initiative to offer a e mail design tool that is considered first-class software to the OS (https://bairmail.com). The last thing I would say is developing desktop apps vs a web app is considerably harder thus most companies are aware they are saving by controlling software updates, versioning etc.

Re: Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud

#152

Post by FpUser »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #90
RustyBucket wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we as engineers owe our users bug fixes, because we messed up at some point. However new functionality or email/phone support? Well, this is what people are not entitled for.

Well, this is what people are not entitled for. But they will expect it.

And pay for upgrades

Re: Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud

#153

Post by FpUser »

scbrg wrote: post #121
rgun wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming you are not providing any updates (not even security critical ones for argument's sake), you only need to package and add documentation for an on-prem installation. Why is it so costly?

> you only need to package and add documentation None of which are insignificant. In addition to that you must now support (and test for) a million configurations, rather than just one.

FUD. Among my products I have desktop software. Sure I got some pains upon initial release but it's been literally years since I really needed to test "for million configurations".

I also have experience developing and maintaining cloud solutions. Total amount of work that goes into large cloud apps and amount of things things that can brake or not work properly is fairly impressive. Definitely not any less then on premises

Re: Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud

#154

Post by rrdharan »

procombo wrote: post #136
jka wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! Having to experience the inventory management problem regularly certainly helps inspire & validate solutions :) The setup you had sounds extremely cool - did you hit any particular challenges around the SKU data wrangling? I've added a naive rules-based approach to categorizing products into supermarket departments (bakery, fruit & veg, ...) - it's really barebones at the moment, but already helps planning wa…

Yeah. I was definitely very AdHoc. A typical grocery store here in the US has about like, what, 20k SKUs? But I personally only really deal with maybe 200 of those, so at the time I just managed the data manually. (Plugged that USB scanner into a laptop and scanned every item into Excel --Scan, type. Scan, type. Then imported that into MySQL.) I looked into data providers mostly because I wanted item photos. (Ultimat…

Why did you stop using this scanner setup?

Re: Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud

#155

Post by jimpick »

StavrosK wrote: post #137
jimpick wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IPFS works fine. I'm on the IPFS team and I use it everyday. Depending on the app, it may or may not be a good fit. The performance you get out of it depends a lot on what features you are using. There's a whole ecosystem of projects (eg. IPFS Companion, IPFS Desktop, IPFS Cluster) and 3rd-party services which are important to consider when deploying a production-ready app. There's a lot of work ongoing to solve some…

> IPFS works fine. I'm on the IPFS team and I use it everyday. I run Eternum.io and IPFS has been such a pain that I am considering just shutting the service down. The node has been consuming so much RAM and CPU (even though it's behind a caching proxy and the gateway should get minimal traffic) that it was disrupting everything else on the server. The memory leaks have been off the charts for ages, so now I just res…

Sorry to hear about your bad experiences.

I think I've experienced some of the same frustrations at times, and I think most of the bugs/problems are well known to the development team and are being actively worked on. It's a very open process. I know there's been a lot of improvement in the year that I've been working on it. The release train moves along slowly at times, especially as we are actively working on improving our testing processes.

Re: Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud

#156

Post by StavrosK »

jimpick wrote: post #155
StavrosK wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IPFS works fine. I'm on the IPFS team and I use it everyday. I run Eternum.io and IPFS has been such a pain that I am considering just shutting the service down. The node has been consuming so much RAM and CPU (even though it's behind a caching proxy and the gateway should get minimal traffic) that it was disrupting everything else on the server. The memory leaks have been off the charts for ages, so now I just res…

Sorry to hear about your bad experiences. I think I've experienced some of the same frustrations at times, and I think most of the bugs/problems are well known to the development team and are being actively worked on. It's a very open process. I know there's been a lot of improvement in the year that I've been working on it. The release train moves along slowly at times, especially as we are actively working on impro…

Thanks, I'm sure you're working on it, and I hope everything gets solved and IPFS is awesome enough to use for archival, distribution, security, censorship-resistance, and the whole other bunch of things that are necessary and that made me create Eternum in the first place.

I'm just frustrated with the glacial progress I'm seeing as an end user...

Re: Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud

#157

Post by diggernet »

neLrivVK wrote: post #119
jmathai wrote: post #12

I've been trying to document my "local-first" approach to managing photos. I've made it a ways through but am not sure when I'll finish. Posting here since it is relevant. A Pragmatic Photo Archiving Solution: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JzqT-DJFlS2e8ZC00HrsQITq... It's the culmination of software I've written [1] + a workflow that's resulted from it [2, 3, 4, 5]. [1] Elodie - https://github.com/jmathai/elodi…

Just read through your google doc, interesting! But what about additional family members, with their own cameras, and no interest in any clever workflow activities :) I'm currently using Google Photos as my main service, and it's working good enough for now: each family member has the Google Photos app which uploads pics automatically, to their own account. We all share our Google Photos with each other. This way I (…

I cringe at the thought of what Google is using that face recognition for.

Re: Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud

#158

Post by cgriswald »

have_faith wrote: post #135

> you OWN YOUR data Like most people here I'm fairly hard line when it comes to personal data abuses but I still struggle with the concepts of owning data about yourself. It's a confusion I see amongst less technically literate people when a well meaning person explains to them the importance of some latest data breach and they try to understand the concept that they owned this data, it was theirs but now it has been…

I don't entirely agree. People may be confused about data, but they are not confused about ownership. They understand ownership quite well. By sticking with that framing, you only have to get them to understand this ephemeral thing. Once you do, they can immediately apply all their concepts of ownership to it. To replace ownership with something else, well, now you've still got to get them to grasp the data, but also this something else, which might necessarily be somewhat abstract.

I'm not even quite convinced they can't grasp the concept. People think they 'own' their digital copy of The Rescuers Down Under, when technically they've leased it. They generally understand they shouldn't post their credit card numbers online. I think it's more likely that they just don't understand the consequences, and even if they did, generally feel dis-empowered to do anything about it. That's a dynamic that has existed since before the internet.

Re: Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud

#159

Post by lilactown »

I recently started using Actual[0], a local-first budgeting app. It's encrypted (soon to be end-to-end), local-first and can be synced across my devices. Would recommend, and I was inspired to use it after following its author, James Long[1] on twitter for awhile.

[0] https://actualbudget.com/

[1]https://twitter.com/jlongster?lang=en

Re: Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud

#160

Post by Jwarder »

have_faith wrote: post #135

> you OWN YOUR data Like most people here I'm fairly hard line when it comes to personal data abuses but I still struggle with the concepts of owning data about yourself. It's a confusion I see amongst less technically literate people when a well meaning person explains to them the importance of some latest data breach and they try to understand the concept that they owned this data, it was theirs but now it has been…

I don't see the article's idea of ownership as universal control, but more focused on being able to use whatever instance of the data you have without needing to rely on a third party.

For example, if I own a book then I can read it, doodle on it, or lend it out at any time. I can't prevent other people from reading/defacing/whatever their copies of the book.

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