yes but think of all those poor shareholders with unmaximized value you heartless man!
Local-first software (2019)
151–160 of 308 posts
Re: Local-first software (2019)
#152Yes a thousand percent! I'm working on this too. 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. I'm working on a fitness tracking app right now that will use the sublime model - just buy it, get updates for X years, sync with all your devices and use it forever. If you want updates after X years buy the newest…
How do you plan to do the syncing without some sort of cloud infrastructure?
There are a lot of valid answers to this! One is to use your platform's provided one, like OneDrive or iCloud. Another is to integrate with some other sync platform. Dropbox is a popular target for this. Peer-to-peer is another, although that obviously also come with limitations. Finally, bring-your-own-sync is a popular choice amongst open-source apps, where you provide a self-hostable sync server.
Re: Local-first software (2019)
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yes, that is true, but again for apps like a fitness tracker, it is not "content" based. Sure, it might have some AI in the form of chatbots to ask what your diet plan should be based on your current progress, but that's not what you're talking about. In my experience, most local-first apps are like this fitness tracker, utility tools, rather than a means to view content, like TikTok.
Re: Local-first software (2019)
#154Re: Local-first software (2019)
#155In 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…
There are a bunch and quite a breadth of different solutions/takes on the problem.
Here is a good recap of the current players. https://www.localfirst.fm/landscape
Re: Local-first software (2019)
#156Yes a thousand percent! I'm working on this too. 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. I'm working on a fitness tracking app right now that will use the sublime model - just buy it, get updates for X years, sync with all your devices and use it forever. If you want updates after X years buy the newest…
Obsidian the note taking app is a great model to follow as well. The client is completely free and they sell an optional syncing service. The notes are all on markdown files so the client is completely optional.
Re: Local-first software (2019)
#157In 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/
Lotus Notes always deserves a mention in these threads too, as 1989's answer to local-first development. CouchDB was heavily inspired by Notes.
Re: Local-first software (2019)
#158One 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 becaus…
What was your prompt?
In my experience it’s great at utilizing local storage and SQLite, if you ask it to.
I just asked the ChatGPT web client (4o, as that’s what most non-developers might default to):
> Can you build me a website for my photos
And it immediately started suggesting Wordpress, Wix, Squarespace, etc.
Specifically, this was section 4 of the various questions it asked me:
> 4. Tech Preference (optional)
> - Do you want this as a static HTML site, WordPress, or built with something like React, Next.js, or Wix/Squarespace? > - Do you need help hosting it (e.g., using Netlify, Vercel, or shared hosting)?
As a non-programmer, I likely wouldn’t understand half those words, and the section is marked optional.
If I follow the “default path” I’m quickly forking over a credit card and uploading my pictures of dogs/family/rocks to the cloud.
Re: Local-first software (2019)
#159Re: Local-first software (2019)
#160Yes a thousand percent! I'm working on this too. 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. I'm working on a fitness tracking app right now that will use the sublime model - just buy it, get updates for X years, sync with all your devices and use it forever. If you want updates after X years buy the newest…
How do you plan to do the syncing without some sort of cloud infrastructure?
There's a git plugin.