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Local-first software (2019)

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Re: Local-first software (2019)

#11

Post by codybontecou »

montereynack wrote: post #9

Cool to see principles behind this, although I think it’s definitely geared towards the consumer space. Shameless self plug, but related: we’re doing this for industrial assets/industrial data currently (www.sentineldevices.com), where the entire training, analysis and decision-making process happens on customer equipment. We don’t even have any servers they can send data to, our model is explicitly geared on everyth…

An exciting space and I'm glad you and your team are working in it.

I looked over your careers page and see all of your positions are non-remote. Is this because of limitations of working on local-first software require you to be in-person? Or is this primarily a management issue?

Re: Local-first software (2019)

#12

Post by jumploops »

One thing I’m personally excited about is the democratization of software via LLMs.

Unfortunately, if you go to ChatGPT and ask it to build a website/app, it immediately points the unknowing user towards a bunch of cloud-based tools like Fly.io, Firebase, Supabase, etc.

Getting a user to install a local DB and a service to run their app (god forbid, updating said service), is a challenge that’s complex, even for developers (hence the prevalence of containers).

It will take some time (i.e. pre-training runs), but this is a future I believe is worth fighting for.

Re: Local-first software (2019)

#13

Post by moffkalast »

jumploops wrote: post #12

One thing I’m personally excited about is the democratization of software via LLMs. Unfortunately, if you go to ChatGPT and ask it to build a website/app, it immediately points the unknowing user towards a bunch of cloud-based tools like Fly.io, Firebase, Supabase, etc. Getting a user to install a local DB and a service to run their app (god forbid, updating said service), is a challenge that’s complex, even for deve…

Local LLMs are even more amazing in concept, all of the world's knowledge and someone to guide you through learning it without needing anything but electricity (and a hilariously expensive inference rig) to run it.

I would be surprised if in a decade we won't have local models that are an order of magnitude better than current cloud offerings while being smaller and faster, and affordable ASICs to run them. That'll be the first real challenger to the internet's current position as "the" place for everything. The more the web gets enshittified and commercialized and ad-ridden, the more people will flock to this sort of option.

Re: Local-first software (2019)

#14

Post by zdragnar »

davepeck wrote: post #10

In theory, I love the local-first mode of building. It aligns well with “small tech” philosophy where privacy and data ownership are fundamental. In practice, it’s hard! You’re effectively responsible for building a sync engine, handling conflict resolution, managing schema migration, etc. This said, tools for local-first software development seem to have improved in the past couple years. I keep my eye on jazz.tools…

I think I saw someone point out automerge not long ago:

https://automerge.org/

Rust and JavaScript implementations, a handful of network strategies. It doesn't come with the free or paid offering that jazz.tools does, but it's pretty nice.

Re: Local-first software (2019)

#15

Post by nicoburns »

Nevermark wrote: post #8
cyanydeez wrote: post #3

Local first is almost equates to both privacy protective and public software good. Essentially antithetical to capitalism, especially America's toxic late stage subscription based enshittification. Which means its typically a labor of love or a government org has a long term understanding of Software as a Infrastructure (as opposed to SaaS)

I think you mean antithetical to corrupted conflict-of-interest capitalism. Conflict-of-interest transactions have hidden or coercive impact, lined up in favor of the party with stronger leverage. Examples include un-asked and unwanted surveillance of data or activity, coercive use of information, vendor lock in, unwanted artificial product/service dependencies, insertion of unwanted interaction (ads), ... None of th…

The problem with our current system of capitalism is that it causes capitalism to accumulate. This leads to less competition, fewer checks and balances, and undermines the whole "wisdom of the crowd" mechanism that captialism is premised on.

If we want a functioning market based system then we need to explicitly correct for this by aggressively taxing the wealthiest entities (individuals and companies) in our society to bring things closer to a level playing field.

Re: Local-first software (2019)

#16

Post by rzzzt »

davepeck wrote: post #10

In theory, I love the local-first mode of building. It aligns well with “small tech” philosophy where privacy and data ownership are fundamental. In practice, it’s hard! You’re effectively responsible for building a sync engine, handling conflict resolution, managing schema migration, etc. This said, tools for local-first software development seem to have improved in the past couple years. I keep my eye on jazz.tools…

CouchDB on the server and PouchDB on the client was an attempt at making such an environment:

- https://couchdb.apache.org/

- https://pouchdb.com/

Also some more pondering on local-first application development from a "few" (~10) years back can be found here: https://unhosted.org/

Re: Local-first software (2019)

#17

Post by bhauer »

I've been wanting a computing model I call PAO [1] for a long time. PAO would run personal application "servers" and connect dynamic clients across all devices. PAO is centralized, but centralized per user, and operating at their discretion. It avoids synchronization, complex concurrent data structures, and many other problems associated with alternatives. Its weakness is a need for always-on networks, but that complication seems ever easier to accept as omnipresent networks become realistic.

[1] https://tiamat.tsotech.com/pao (2012)

Re: Local-first software (2019)

#18

Post by ofrzeta »

davepeck wrote: post #10

In theory, I love the local-first mode of building. It aligns well with “small tech” philosophy where privacy and data ownership are fundamental. In practice, it’s hard! You’re effectively responsible for building a sync engine, handling conflict resolution, managing schema migration, etc. This said, tools for local-first software development seem to have improved in the past couple years. I keep my eye on jazz.tools…

Do you know that website? https://www.localfirst.fm

EDIT: actually I wanted to point to the "landscape" link (in the top menu) but that URL is quite unergonomic.

Re: Local-first software (2019)

#20

Post by ibizaman »

That’s essentially what I’m trying to make widely available through my projects https://github.com/ibizaman/selfhostblocks and https://github.com/ibizaman/skarabox. Their shared goal is to make self-hosting more approachable to the masses.

It’s based on NixOS to provide as much as possible out of the box and declaratively: https, SSO, LDAP, backups, ZFS w/ snapshots, etc.

It’s a competitor to cloud hosting because it packages Vaultwarden and Nextcloud to store most of your data. It does provide more services than that though, home assistant for example.

It’s a competitor to YUNoHost but IMO better (or aims to be) because you can use the building blocks provided by SelfHostBlocks to self-host any packages you want. It’s more of a library than a framework.

It’s a competitor to NAS but better because everything is open source.

It still requires the user to be technical but I’m working on removing that caveat. One of my goals is to allow to install it on your hardware without needing nix or touching the command line.

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