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Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud

blog.acolyer.org

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Re: Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud

#141

Post by gtirloni »

have_faith wrote: post #135

> you OWN YOUR data Like most people here I'm fairly hard line when it comes to personal data abuses but I still struggle with the concepts of owning data about yourself. It's a confusion I see amongst less technically literate people when a well meaning person explains to them the importance of some latest data breach and they try to understand the concept that they owned this data, it was theirs but now it has been…

You could argue in the past that PII data was just name, birthday, SSN, etc. However, nowadays pretty much anyone can be identified by their metadata so that's where I think this broad sense of ownership comes from.

Re: Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud

#142

Post by mrkeen »

have_faith wrote: post #135

> you OWN YOUR data Like most people here I'm fairly hard line when it comes to personal data abuses but I still struggle with the concepts of owning data about yourself. It's a confusion I see amongst less technically literate people when a well meaning person explains to them the importance of some latest data breach and they try to understand the concept that they owned this data, it was theirs but now it has been…

Ownership is precisely the right word to use.

Companies should possess your data, not own it.

Re: Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud

#143

Post by SeanMacConMara »

have_faith wrote: post #135

> you OWN YOUR data Like most people here I'm fairly hard line when it comes to personal data abuses but I still struggle with the concepts of owning data about yourself. It's a confusion I see amongst less technically literate people when a well meaning person explains to them the importance of some latest data breach and they try to understand the concept that they owned this data, it was theirs but now it has been…

consider the concept that lots of businesses operate perfectly fine whilst temporarily having full physical control over physcial objects owned by their customers

why not treat data the same way ?

yes it will be very disruptive to some businesses. i hope.

Re: Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud

#144

Post by [deleted] »

daleharvey wrote: post #123

I may be biased as the maintainer of PouchDB but you can do all this today (and for the last 5+ years) with PouchDB. The comment about CouchDB and the "difficulty of getting application-level conflict resolution right" I am not really certain how it applies, You dont have to handle conflicts in Pouch/CouchDB if you dont want to, there is a default model of last write (actually most edits) wins but you can handle them…

[deleted]

Re: Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud

#145

Post by vbsteven »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #99
vbsteven wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My view on this is a bit different. I see Kubernetes as the abstraction layer on top of the cloud providers. In the last few years I have set up multiple k8s clusters for clients who specifically do not want to be locked in to a certain cloud provider. Once the software is running on top of k8s it is easy to switch cloud providers without changing the software. Switching to another cloud provider this way is trivial…

> Switching to another cloud provider this way is trivial Based on my limited experience, I highly doubt this. Have you actually deployed cross-cloud k8s setups, or is this merely a theoretical statement on your part? Deploying to another cloud provider brings a whole new universe of failure modes and auth quirks, let alone migration and switch-over woos.

I’ve done a couple cluster switches from k8s on AWS to other providers like Digital Ocean and GCP. As far as I recall we had no issues and one of those was done in about an hour were most of the time was spent waiting for pg_dump/restore.

Note that most of these were not production clusters so switch-over was just data restore and DNS changes.

I build clusters from the start to not use cloud-specifics where possible and all cloud-specific configuration is on the cluster edges in terraform which you have to rewrite anyway when switching clouds.

Auth things like IAM permissions are not an issue if everything is “in cluster” and auth/permissions are checked there.

Most of these deployments consist of several application servers, PG databases, redis, rabbitmq etc

Re: Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud

#146

Post by koheripbal »

herf wrote: post #139

I spent a lot of time with photos (Picasa) trying to do this peer to peer - this is what we built in the 2002 era. Here are a few issues: 1. Identity is hard to do on the LAN, so any sharing ends up using the cloud to figure out who has access. Similarly, identity is hard to move around, so representing your Facebook comments feed outside Facebook is difficult to do. 2. Any time you have a "special" server that handl…

With regards to identity management, maybe there should be a formalized integration between browsers and password managers such that the concept of "registration" goes away and new logins just automatically create user accounts with default permissions, according to email address.

Re: Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud

#147

Post by mytherin »

vpEfljFL wrote: post #59
jdnenej wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not a fair comparison since most of the memory usage is just loading the app in to memory and then everyone is sharing the same app already loaded. Web apps don't have to be nearly as slow as they are. It's just that it's easier to make a slow app than a fast one. Also desktop apps are becoming super slow and bloated now thanks to electron.

> Also desktop apps are becoming super slow and bloated now thanks to electron. I can't quite get this point. From my perspective software engineers love/adore electron applications. Look at VScode as the example: - electron based javascript application - telemetry included - proprietary build with "open core" It is literally the most popular code editor right now (p.s. I don't use it). Why as a tech savvy user you w…

As a user of VSCode, I use it in spite of it being based on Electron because there are no other good alternatives. It is noticeably very slow on many tasks, and has a large startup time. I recently had it basically become unusable when opening a 2MB yacc file and had to switch to Sublime Text to edit the file. I much prefer Sublime Text in terms of speed, but VSCode simply has more and better extensions for different programming languages making it better for day-to-day coding. If somebody were to make a performant text editor that has similar features to VSCode I would switch in a heartbeat.

Re: Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud

#148

Post by fonosip »

gdfasfklshg4 wrote: post #65
jwr wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I fully agree with your selection criteria, please consider the other side of the equation, because engineering (and the world) is all about compromises. I am the author of a SaaS app ( https://partsbox.io/ ). I export in open formats (JSON), there is no lock-in, it's easy to get all of your data at any time. But the app is online and will remain so. Why? Economics. Maintaining a self-hosted solution is an enor…

Worth a thought. How does desktop software achieve backwards compatibility? For example Libreoffice can work with arbitrary datastores from the 1990's. Meanwhile with modern web based software we struggle to maintain compatibility within a single datastore.

We are working on a self-hosted Nextcloud, Onlyoffice solution. Specs here https://ba.net/office

Re: Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud

#149

Post by s_y_n_t_a_x »

thu2111 wrote: post #72
vpEfljFL wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also desktop apps are becoming super slow and bloated now thanks to electron. I can't quite get this point. From my perspective software engineers love/adore electron applications. Look at VScode as the example: - electron based javascript application - telemetry included - proprietary build with "open core" It is literally the most popular code editor right now (p.s. I don't use it). Why as a tech savvy user you w…

Obvious answer: it's the only IDE-like thing that's both well supported and caters to the huge population of JavaScript-only developers, who generally don't want to use IntelliJ or similar products because they can't customise it using only web-stack skills. That is, if JetBrains had made JS plugins first class citizens of their products, possibly VS Code wouldn't be as popular as it is.

Sublime was the leader before VSCode and it had python plugins. VSCode is popular because it works so well with TypeScript

Re: Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud

#150

Post by wazoox »

I'm using NextCloud for that. Nextcloud can be basically used in local-first mode (mimicking dropbox).

My phone automatically uploads all pictures to the NextCloud. Then there are apps. For instance I use Nextcloud with the Music app to stream my own mp3s from my Nextcloud to my phone running Ampache.

There are also collaborative editing tools, and various options to edit all sort of documents in a web UI, and always the local editing fallback (or the opposite way, as you see fit).

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