My company built this more than 10 years ago, and nobody was interested. Here's a press release from 2007:
Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud
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Re: Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud
#12I'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/elodie
[2] Understanding my need for an automated photo workflow - https://medium.com/vantage/understanding-my-need-for-an-auto...
[3] Introducing Elodie; Your Personal EXIF-based Photo and Video Assistant - https://medium.com/vantage/understanding-my-need-for-an-auto...
[4] My Automated Photo Workflow using Google Photos and Elodie - https://medium.com/@jmathai/my-automated-photo-workflow-usin...
[5] One Year of Using an Automated Photo Organization and Archiving Workflow - https://artplusmarketing.com/one-year-of-using-an-automated-...
Re: Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud
#13Things are happening in that space already!
I work at Actyx and we have a production ready stack for local-first real serverless (peer-to-peer) applications. Please take a look at https://actyx.com/ .
Re: Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud
#14P2P has miles to go before challenging the reliability, convenience and performance of the cloud.
That said, one area undervalued is Partially homomorphic cryptosystems[1], where the cloud never ever gets to see unencrypted user data.
I hope the future is fast-local compute on cached data, with the cloud holding a much larger, encrypted but permissioned data store, offering utility functions like search over encrypted data
Re: Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud
#15Today's SaaS world is largely economically opposed to the idea of data ownership. It's a lot easier to make money by renting people access to their data. The problem is not inherently technical. The solution must address the fact that the software businesses favor cloud solutions and other systems that make it difficult to stop spending money
Yes. I always think data freedom is more important than software freedom. For example it matters less that MS Word is not free as in freedom when you can open the file in something that is.
And cloud SaaS are enemies of both! After all, in order to have data freedom, you need to have something to open in that other program, and cloud solutions do their best to not give you proper open/save file (and even if there's an export function, and even if everything is actually included in the export, it often isn't followed by import function that could read that export).
For this reason, I avoid using cloud SaaS for anything where can avoid it.
Re: Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud
#16Today's SaaS world is largely economically opposed to the idea of data ownership. It's a lot easier to make money by renting people access to their data. The problem is not inherently technical. The solution must address the fact that the software businesses favor cloud solutions and other systems that make it difficult to stop spending money
Yes, this is it.
We went from local, to local infrastructure/IT, to cloud services in which data is mixed with other data and ownership is nebulous.
The business as you say, favours this, because the 'downsides' of the model are more on the side of risk (your data leaking, losing rights to your data, your data being 'sold' etc.) - which we don't like to pay for until it's too late.
Unless there are 'big scares' or regulatory requirements etc. I don't see that much changing.
But a single major leak from Salesforce or say Google Docs could see a massive shift in how we think about such things.
Re: Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud
#17Martin Kleppmann is a major inspiration for our startup, Ditto.
We take the local-first concept and p2p to the next level with CRDTs and replication. But what we really do is leverage things like AWDL, mDNS, and or Bluetooth low energy to sync mobile databases instances with each other even without internet connectivity. www.ditto.live
Check it out in action!
https://youtu.be/1P2bKEJjdec https://youtu.be/ITUrk_rjnvo
We found that CRDTs, local first, and eventual consistency REALLY shines in the mobile phones since they constantly experience network partitions.
Re: Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud
#18The data ownership is very important for business world. The reason why we built our products for IoT ( www.bevywise.com ) as a more install able version is the data privacy and ownership.
We really see this largely in manufacturing industry. If not local, we should provide private servers and data security.
Re: Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud
#19any marginally successful "local-first" app is going to go and raise $10m in vc, switch to software as a service, and add an enterprise mode that requires user permissions and data access to be managed on the server
Sure, any one company probably will - but there’s a whole market.
As soon as that one company abandons the local-first model, a gap opens, which will (usually, eventually) be filled by a new company offering local-first until that new company does the same.
As long as the companies don’t band together and agree to end it, there should be a company offering that model somewhere somehow.
Re: Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud
#20Not related to the actual content, but may I please request you to increase the contrast on your website. Grey on grey is very hard to read.