TODO: build a local-first livestream remote conference zoom alternative software
Wasn't this Skype, originally? Pre-Microsoft acquisition?
Local-first software (2019)
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Re: Local-first software (2019)
#12> ... cloud apps depend on the service continuing to be available: if the service is unavailable, you cannot use the software, and you can no longer access your data created with that software. This means you are betting that the creators of the software will continue supporting it for a long time — at least as long as you care about the data. Although there does not seem to be a great danger of Google shutting down Google Docs anytime soon, popular products (e.g. Google Reader) do sometimes get shutdown or lose data, so we know to be careful.
Plus, the value of the cloud app is not just your data, but the network effects. Like, if you've emailed links to a GDocs document, and 5 years later you decide to move to another service, those GDocs links will 404, regardless of whether you've transferred all of your data to the new service.
With local-first apps, the URL starts with you, not some some-sass-provider.com.
Re: Local-first software (2019)
#13Was this paper in a journal?
It was published in the proceedings for Onward! 2019.
Re: Local-first software (2019)
#14Unfortunately local-first software is incompatible with you being a slave to your preferred technology company of choice (Facebook, Apple, Google, Microsoft). If it wasn't for GDPR, most of these companies wouldn't even offer exports of your data.
GDPR was born yesterday, and government intervention on such private matters can really cause a disaster. You want to have control over your data, and just to cite one case, Apple has started embracing it a while ago ahead of GDPR laws. Perhaps because it is a hardware company it has more incentives (like, it could very well create something akin to a 'family vault' that would be a fancy digital vault that you could…
>I am positive that market forces would achieve the same effect sooner if it were not by GDPR.
Considering how many business practices across the board aren't very consumer friendly and are seemingly growing ever more anti-competitive in nature while skirting antitrust definitions in grey areas, I'm personally not nearly so sure we can rely on "market forces" to protect anything but the business in question.
In fact, the only thing I've seen market forces achieve is self-preservation and interest which may or may not align with the rest of what society wants or needs.
Re: Local-first software (2019)
#15TODO: build a local-first livestream remote conference zoom alternative software
Wasn't this Skype, originally? Pre-Microsoft acquisition?
Everyone starts with p2p and realizes it doesn't work. OG skype predates fast internet and expectations of extremely smooth conferencing between arbitrary number of users. A centralised server is basically a requirement for acceptable performance.
Re: Local-first software (2019)
#16Unfortunately local-first software is incompatible with you being a slave to your preferred technology company of choice (Facebook, Apple, Google, Microsoft). If it wasn't for GDPR, most of these companies wouldn't even offer exports of your data.
Netflix is always the perfect example against this weird logic. They commited to AWS, and stuck with it even after Amazon itself is one of their prime competitors. They clearly decided that infra and devops is not their core competency and have absolved themselves of that responsibility and are ready to pay a premium for it.
On the other side we have people who keep patting themselves in their back about their Emacs setup being able to run a web server from a raspberry Pi.
We're at a place where it's fairly counter intuitive to continue arguing against cloud providers. I doubt azure or AWS are going to go down with a probability that should worry any business (and even then it should be recoverable). The only danger with cloud providers is that if your engineering team is not exactly smart you can rack up a million dollar bill for a dog walking app. But thars more about your ability to recruit disciplines engineers, no point blaming it on the cloud.
Look at Imgur. For the most part bootstrapped, scales extremely well, and if I'm not wrong, is very frugal, also runs off AWS.
Re: Local-first software (2019)
#17Unfortunately local-first software is incompatible with you being a slave to your preferred technology company of choice (Facebook, Apple, Google, Microsoft). If it wasn't for GDPR, most of these companies wouldn't even offer exports of your data.
Netflix is always the perfect example against this weird logic. They commited to AWS, and stuck with it even after Amazon itself is one of their prime competitors. They clearly decided that infra and devops is not their core competency and have absolved themselves of that responsibility and are ready to pay a premium for it. On the other side we have people who keep patting themselves in their back about their Emacs…
> doubt azure or AWS are going to go down with a probability that should worry any business
Were you asleep when S3 East failed to the point that half of the internet was offline or did you just not get a notification?
https://aws.amazon.com/message/41926/
> The only danger with cloud providers is that if your engineering team is not exactly smart you can rack up a million dollar bill for a dog walking app
The public cloud has never been recession tested and these next few years may be the only way to do it. The model works as long as there are people willing to pay for Amazon and Azure will raise prices if the base load drops below a certain point.
Re: Local-first software (2019)
#18Re: Local-first software (2019)
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wasn't this Skype, originally? Pre-Microsoft acquisition?
Everyone starts with p2p and realizes it doesn't work. OG skype predates fast internet and expectations of extremely smooth conferencing between arbitrary number of users. A centralised server is basically a requirement for acceptable performance.
There is a step between peer to peer and centralized, and that is federated. For most services, that should be the sweet spot.
Re: Local-first software (2019)
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wasn't this Skype, originally? Pre-Microsoft acquisition?
Everyone starts with p2p and realizes it doesn't work. OG skype predates fast internet and expectations of extremely smooth conferencing between arbitrary number of users. A centralised server is basically a requirement for acceptable performance.
What does the server do that the callers can't? Compress video?