241–250 of 494 posts
The title doesn't match the content well, everyone's responding to the title! The syncing issue is also handled better by making the logical unit that gets changed as small as possible. If you have two people editing a document, instead of locking the document, and wiping out changes from other people, think of it as a series of edits to a paragraph, or smaller a sentence, or even the exact word being changed. If som…
Subscription-based software made a lot of products affordable. $49.95 a month indefinitely is a lot easier for many small businesses to sustain than a lump sum of $1,500 for a software package.
Considering how undercapitalized most small businesses are, it's not hard to see why many of them may prefer to rent the software instead of buying it.
I believe the lack of popularity is more of an economics problem. There are established business models for SaaS apps or freemium with ads. But, the business model for local-first apps is not as lucrative. Those who like the local-first model value features like: data-sovereignty, end-to-end encryption, offline usage, etc. These properties make existing business models hard-to-impossible to apply. My current thinking…
And the price they give me from clicking the ad is a limited-time discount so then I'm turned off from ever coming back later and paying the full price i.e. the sucker's price.
Surely this isn't the optimal business model for many of the products that have adopted it.
I want many more Local-Only apps, thanks. Self-Hosted. Or Federated apps, again Self-Hosted. And I think network infrastructure has been holding us back horribly. I think with something like Tailscale, we can make local-only apps or federated apps way, way easier to write.
The tech is getting there though. With things like hole punching or webrtc, P2P is getting pretty easy to implement. Though it's still a challenge to implement it in an actual project.
I do believe that we're going to start seeing quality local-first software w/ great networking pop up more and more soon. I'm working on that, but I'm sure there are plenty others who are doing the same.
[1] Open-source, see my profile for info
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your point is correct, but OP is correct. There are currently tens of thousands of games that are unplayable due to requiring pinging to a network/patch server which long ago was deprecated. Forsaking patch requirements, just as many games are no longer playable due to incompatibility/abandoned OS, codebase, gamebreaking bugs. In both of these scenarios, my "lifetime license" is no longer usable through no action of…
I think this thread is an example of a fascinating class of miscommunication I've observed on HN, but I want to say it out loud to see if I'm understanding it. Two people meet in an HN thread, and they both dislike the status quo in a particular way (e.g. that copyright is awful, DRMed games suck, whatever). They both want to fight back against the thing that they dislike, but they do it in different ways. One person…
I think just doing files and then syncing the files with another solution it's okay. For example my local apps: Synthing syncs the files between my computer and phone for Note taking(just markdown and org files) obsidian on my phone, emacs/vim on my PC. Todo and reminders: org mode in emacs (desktop) orgzly on mobile. Password manager: KeePassxc desktop, keepassdx mobile. Calendar: just sync the ics file. Photos: jus…
The problem is that this has effectively no conflict resolution. With naive file-based sync the best Syncthing can do is save both files. Then you are stuck merging yourself. Maybe if all of your devices are reliably online and you only use one at a time. But eventually you get a delayed sync resulting in a state fork and you end up with a mess. For photos and some other type of data this likely isn't much of a probl…
Other vendors like Powersync and ElectricSQL have a similar offering but are upfront about it. And at least in Powersync’s case (don’t know about Electricsql) you can also run their offering yourself.
Because when your selling point is that its local first (or distributed, or any other politically trendy thing), you concentrate on that over the app's core value proposition. The end result is you make an app that does what people think they want at the expense of doing as good a job as possible at the thing people actually want.
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Is local-first local-only actually harder to build and secure than a four-nines uptime service? I understand that it's less profitable, which is the real reason nobody does it.
Building and securing local first is definitely harder than four-nines. Want 99.99% uptime? Easy. Cloudflare, AWS, fly.io, Vercel etc. have poured decades of person-years of engineering into platform reliability and operational excellence so you can get it with a few quick CLI commands.