Local-first software (2019)

Edit: of course local-first does not mean merely "backup", but instead the (redundant) hardware serves as a primary data store. I would welcome that as well!

I agree that "cloud" is becoming a thought-terminating cliché (and I myself fall prey to reflexive reactions to that word all too often). I think the core issue is something different - it's about relationships. It's a point of view I've been exploring recently, and I find it to be illuminating. Some thoughts:

1. Individuals do not handle relationships as well as companies. That's the source of "subscription fatigue" - you end up having to mentally keep track of all the third parties you may or may not owe money to, that may or may not do something that impacts your life down the line. Companies have dedicated people and processes for handling this, most individuals do not (rich people can hire help).

2. Individuals do not necessarily want all these relationships. If I buy a toaster, I don't want any relationship with its maker[0] - for the same reason that when I buy bread from a grocery store, I don't want to enter into relationship with the seller, or the baker, or the farmer that provided the flour[1].

3. Power imbalance in relationships matter. Individuals are almost always irrelevant to the service provider, so for a regular person it's better to not have any relationship at all. For companies, it depends. A corporation like Microsoft or Google can be rather certain that Salesforce isn't going to pull a fast one over them, due to relative sizes and the amount of money changing hands. Smaller companies fall somewhere on the spectrum between individuals and megacorps.

4. The above colors risk calculation. If my relationship with the service provider is closer to that of peers, I can feel safer about depositing data with them or making myself dependent on their service, because they're incentivized to provide a good service to me, and I can hurt them if they don't (say, by switching to a competitor). Companies do the same calculus. A small studio is best to think twice about depending on third-party services for anything that may outlive such services. A large company can derisk the relationship through a contract.

5. Part of the objection I and many others have to SaaS is that consumer-oriented SaaS (including "stuff as a service", aka. turning products into services) tends to be exploitative by design. You wouldn't consider a friend a person that abuses you mentally or tries to cheat you out of your money, so why enter into a relationship with a company that tries the same? Except when you have no other choice, which is why everything becoming a service is a worrying trend.

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[0] - Beyond the one managed by consumer protection laws. But this kind of relationship is something you do not need to mentally keep track of - it doesn't come with any unexpected consequences, and the terms of relationship are shared (they're part of the law).

[1] - Again, beyond the implicit ones fully handled by consumer protection and health&safety laws.

I once imagined that homomorphic encryption would allow people to store data in their personal/neighborhood clouds and have third party SaaS code operate on that data locally. But I've recently been made to understand that homomorphic encryption would also allow companies to fully close off any access to data beyond what a program/service wants to give out, and unfortunately I get the feeling that the market will prefer the latter over the former.

The irony that Etherpad is written in Node is not lost on me.

And what happens when that one server goes down or becomes overloaded?