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Local-first software (2019)

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Re: Local-first software (2019)

#141

Post by ibizaman »

virgoerns wrote: post #70
ibizaman wrote: post #20

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 i…

I love that you include hledger! It's amazing piece of software, even if a little obscure for people unfamiliar with plaintext accounting!

I love that application. I plan to make some improvements to the web UI. I’d love to have multiple tabs with saved reports. That would allow my spouse to use it quite easily. I’ll be adding that at some point.

Re: Local-first software (2019)

#142

Post by ibizaman »

voat wrote: post #28
ibizaman wrote: post #20

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 i…

Looks really neat! Thanks for building this

Thank you for the kind words :)

Re: Local-first software (2019)

#143

Post by threetonesun »

kristianc wrote: post #98

The old model—a one-time purchase, local install, full user control—worked because devs could sell boxed software at scale. Now, that model collapses unless someone’s willing to either Undervalue their own labour, or treat the software like a public good, absorbing the long tail of maintenance with no recurring income. The article posits it as though subscription software is something which has been sneaked in on us.…

The old model of boxed updates is still in use by some companies today, JetBrains comes to mind. In either case you tuck major new features in a new major version or rolling yearly releases and sell the customer a license to the software that gets a year of updates. In a similar vein many apps I use on my Mac have monthly subscriptions but cancelling them limits their use to essentially one device, but doesn't remove the application or my access to the data.

Re: Local-first software (2019)

#145

Post by satvikpendem »

GMoromisato wrote: post #24

Personally, I disagree with this approach. This is trying to solve a business problem (I can't trust cloud-providers) with a technical trade-off (avoid centralized architecture). The problems with closed-source software (lack of control, lack of reliability) were solved with a new business model: open source development, which came with new licenses and new ways of getting revenue (maintenance contracts instead of li…

> This is trying to solve a business problem (I can't trust cloud-providers)

Not necessarily. I like local-first due to robust syncing via CRDTs, not because I somehow want to avoid cloud providers.

Re: Local-first software (2019)

#146

Post by satvikpendem »

zdragnar wrote: post #14
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.

I like https://loro.dev personally, also in Rust and JS. Many such CRDTs are being built in Rust these days.

Re: Local-first software (2019)

#147

Post by echelon »

satvikpendem wrote: post #140
echelon wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm sick of everyone trying to come up with a use case to get all my data in everyone's cloud so I have to pay a subscription fee to just make things work. AI photo and video generation is impractical to run locally. ComfyUI and Flux exist, but they serve a tiny sliver of the market with very expensive gamer GPUs. And if you wanted to cater to that market, you'd have to support dozens of different SKUs and deal wit…

But who said anything about AI? Lots of local-first apps have nor need any AI whatsoever. And by the way, Topaz Labs has good offerings for editing photos and videos with AI that run locally, works great for many use cases (although it's not fully generative like Veo etc, more like upscaling and denoising, which does use generative AI but not like the former).

I suspect that most content will be generated in the future and that generation will dominate the creative fields, white collar work, and most internet usage.

If that's true, it's a substantial upset to the old paradigms of data and computing.

Re: Local-first software (2019)

#148

Post by satvikpendem »

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…

> 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.

Not sure where your experience is coming from but when I asked an LLM, Claude to be more precise, it referred me to local options first, such as SQLite. It didn't consider cloud platforms at all until I had asked, presumably because it can understand local code and data (it can query it directly and get back results) but cannot understand the context of what's in the cloud unless you configure it properly and give it the env variables to query said data.

Re: Local-first software (2019)

#149

Post by jonotime »

Awesome to see this getting more coverage. I am very interested in local first and I am working on several progressive web apps based around this. One app depends on file sync, not database sync and the best I have found is remoteStorage.js. Its not perfect, but its very much the missing piece I was often looking for.
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