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The cloud is a prison. can the local-first software movement set us free?

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Re: The cloud is a prison. can the local-first software movement set us free?

#141

Post by aequitas »

dgudkov wrote: post #99
Thaxll wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things did not worked great, you should see the bad practices about ci/cd, security etc ... let the dev ssh root into a linux box, 1000 days uptime, no patch...

Exactly the same things now happen in your cloud provider. Now you just don't see them.

You might see them. But it's far easier for a dev team to take control of the ops side in the cloud with IaC, API's and automated tooling like Terraform. It's still very hard to find companies that do on-prem, API first.

Re: The cloud is a prison. can the local-first software movement set us free?

#142

Post by capableweb »

taylodl wrote: post #54
weberer wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you read the article? "Local" here means running on the user's computer. It is not talking about private data centers.

And there are good reasons why we abandoned that approach 20 years ago. It's a nightmare to support.

Yup, and probably computers today is just a divergent and unique as computers were 20 years ago, so no need to ever look into this issue again. I guess that's the reason there is basically 0 good desktop applications in today's modern computing world, I certainly cannot think of a single successful desktop application.

Good thinking!

Re: The cloud is a prison. can the local-first software movement set us free?

#143

Post by yonz »

oblib wrote: post #133

I worked on a local first version of an app I sell. I use CouchDB to store user data so it was pretty easy to implement because CouchDB will sync a local CouchDB to the Cloud based CouchDB as soon as any changes are made. That app is now 20 years old and over those years I've had users who quit using it call me years later to ask if I could give them access to their expired account or a copy of all their data. CouchD…

Thanks for sharing your experience, what was the app? Personally, I don't think I would have gone through the trouble as well. For example, I used to have a ton of Evernote entries and don't think I would setup a personal CouchDB just to get access to it.

A middle ground could be a file path to an sqlite file that can be copied, opened or backed up in the cloud.

Re: The cloud is a prison. can the local-first software movement set us free?

#144

Post by gadders »

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #50
taylodl wrote: post #29

Anyone who's worked inside a large organization knows the cloud is the solution to be able to get things done and deliver value to the business. Why? On-prem solutions require I work with the infrastructure group, who wants to cookie-cutter me into their limited stable of infrastructure options; I have to work with the systems group, who gives me very limited options and configurations for the operating systems; the…

On-prem thankfully is changing quickly. It used to be boutique, every shop kludging together their own plan, cobbling together an assorted mix of vendor and open source. There were few macro patterns. The major change in the last 10 years is that there's now a very stable & general open-source cloud platform that covers a much wider range of the stack than what we had before, and which has achieved a critical mass of…

Yeah, I agree. I think cloud was a great forcing-function to make internal infra groups raise their game or be replaced.

However, if you have I do worry that once people have fully migrated to the cloud they will have a captive audience and will start ramping up the costs.

Re: The cloud is a prison. can the local-first software movement set us free?

#145

Post by colechristensen »

ldjkfkdsjnv wrote: post #107
colechristensen wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to be able to beat the cloud locally to make doing so make sense. AWS et al. set the bar and it’s difficult to beat them with your local infrastructure.

They have 10000 engineers working 50 hours a week to keep their cloud running. The thing works on the back of very hard work from very smart people.

You don't need that much to have a cloud with several 9's of uptime.

If you've never done the work or been around it, the difficulty becomes a bit mythologized.

Re: The cloud is a prison. can the local-first software movement set us free?

#146

Post by oblib »

m_mueller wrote: post #131

Btw. Lotus Notes did exactly this already in the 80s - apps based on local database replicas. CouchDB comes from an ex Lotus dev (Damian Katz) who, inspired by this, created a peer to peer database with similar functionality. Thus I think it would still be a good fit for this kind of local first application.

I've installed CouchDB and an app I made on both my local desktop pc (Mac Mini) and my app server (DigitalOcean) and it's pretty sweet.

I've also installed both the app and CouchDB on a Raspberry Pi in my office and set it up to sync with the DigitalOcean server. This lets me run the app on all the devices in my office even when the internet is not accessible.

In both scenarios the local app is faster and since syncing runs in the background there's no lag when using the app at all.

Re: The cloud is a prison. can the local-first software movement set us free?

#147

Post by [deleted] »

taylodl wrote: post #29

Anyone who's worked inside a large organization knows the cloud is the solution to be able to get things done and deliver value to the business. Why? On-prem solutions require I work with the infrastructure group, who wants to cookie-cutter me into their limited stable of infrastructure options; I have to work with the systems group, who gives me very limited options and configurations for the operating systems; the…

[deleted]

Re: The cloud is a prison. can the local-first software movement set us free?

#148

Post by YurgenJurgensen »

taeric wrote: post #126
YurgenJurgensen wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is a physical media collection any more of a liability than a streaming service? If whoever you're paying wants to double their prices, throw in ads, pull your favourite series, replace your favourite book with one that's been "updated for modern audiences", ban you because they think your doorbell is racist, ban you because they automatically detected an infringing performance of 4'33" in your cloud storage or stop…

For different definitions of "liability?" Losing access to media sorta sucks, but is honestly not that big of a deal for the vast majority of it folks have. Consider that the vast majority of consumed media forever has been radio and broadcast/cable. And until very recently, you either saw the show live, or you missed it. Really isn't much different and you don't typically feel a loss that you can't watch last year's…

Who is doing the preservation in your world if not 'everyone'? Every individual party has things they'd rather not exist, so the only way to ensure media is preserved is to just make lots of copies among lots of parties.

Re: The cloud is a prison. can the local-first software movement set us free?

#149

Post by taeric »

YurgenJurgensen wrote: post #148
taeric wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For different definitions of "liability?" Losing access to media sorta sucks, but is honestly not that big of a deal for the vast majority of it folks have. Consider that the vast majority of consumed media forever has been radio and broadcast/cable. And until very recently, you either saw the show live, or you missed it. Really isn't much different and you don't typically feel a loss that you can't watch last year's…

Who is doing the preservation in your world if not 'everyone'? Every individual party has things they'd rather not exist, so the only way to ensure media is preserved is to just make lots of copies among lots of parties.

I appreciate the idea, but I assure you that the vast majority of media that people hold on to are tossed when they die.

To that end, I'm very much in favor of enabling and strengthening libraries.

Note that I'm also not against letting people build up these collections. I don't share in the romanticizing of building up giant collections of media that you still don't own. Yes, you can sell the media to someone else. No, you don't have any real ownership of the story or contents. And with how hard preserving digital media actually is, few are doing a good job preserving those.

Re: The cloud is a prison. can the local-first software movement set us free?

#150

Post by 1123581321 »

akho wrote: post #27
shafyy wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CleanShot X for Mac is a great example of this. It's basically a screenshotting and screen recording tool that you install. But you can also tell it to upload your images and videos to their cloud and get a link to share them with your friends or coworkers (especially helpful for screencasts for example).

Why not dropbox or whatever place you use to share files normally? a screenshot program does not need a cloud.

I use Cleanshot’s competitor Dropshare for this reason. I’ve configured it to upload files I want to share to my own B2 bucket.
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