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Why haven't local-first apps become popular?

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Re: Why haven't local-first apps become popular?

#321

Post by rkomorn »

nightfly wrote: post #320
rkomorn wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't imagine wanting to self-host something like Jira, GitHub, or some wiki product unless there's a very big financial cost difference that more than offsets my time and hardware investment. Otherwise it seems like I'm just spending time and effort achieving the exact same result.

I work in an org with 8ish FTEs, a handful of student workers, and like 200 volunteers. Almost every service wants $5 or more per user per month, that's $1,140 per month per service. We selfhost open source solutions for everything we can and sometimes have to write something in-house to meet our needs.

That sounds an awful lot like, to you, that is the "very big financial cost difference" I mentioned.

Re: Why haven't local-first apps become popular?

#322

Post by sakesun »

cyberax wrote: post #303
crazygringo wrote: post #273

> The Solution: CRDTs. The right approach is CRDTs (Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types)... This means you can apply messages in any order, even multiple times, and every device will still converge to the same state. This is very much "draw the rest of the owl". Creating a CRDT model for your data that matches intuitive user expectations and obeys consistent business logic is... not for the faint of heart. Also remem…

We have a local-first app. Our approach? Just ignore the conflicts. The last change wins. No, really. In practice for most cases the conflicts are either trivial, or impossible. Trivial conflicts like two people modifying the same note are trivial for users, once you have a simple audit log. And impossible conflicts are impossible to solve automatically anyway and require business processes around them. Example: two…

Just have audit log. No need to try solving every trivial cases. Make something useful.

Re: Why haven't local-first apps become popular?

#323

Post by jonahx »

dusted wrote: post #234

They used to be really popular, back in the ancient times when I was young and full of excitement for all things compute, almost all software was local-first, and.. only :) But since the entire world economy has turned to purely optimizing for control and profit, there's just no good reason to not screw people over as much and as often as possible, what'll they do ? Switch to someone who won't ? And who would that be…

> there's just no good reason to not screw people over as much and as often as possible, what'll they do ? Switch to someone who won't ? And who would that be ?

That argument flies in the face of basic economics.

The problem is that the people don't seem to care about being screwed. If they did, it would very profitable to provide the non-screwing, and lots of people would.

The optimist in me believes this is a just a problem of education, understanding, and risk-assessment (ie, the screwing is hidden to them). But even if we grant this, that turns out be a very hard problem to solve.

Re: Why haven't local-first apps become popular?

#324

Post by gwbas1c »

Xelbair wrote: post #291
gwbas1c wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Technical reasons are honestly overblown Having built a sync product, it is dramatically simpler (from a technical standpoint) to require that clients are connected, send operations immediately to central location, and then succeed / fail there. Once things like offline sync are part of the picture, there's a whole set of infrequent corner cases that come in that are also very difficult to explain to non-technical…

but it is nothing that cannot be solved - if it was more profitable we would all be doing it.

Oh, it's very solvable. (As I pointed out.)

The bigger issue is naivety. A lot of these corner cases mean that it's unlikely someone can just put together a useful prototype in a weekend or two.

> if it was more profitable we would all be doing it.

More like, if there was more demand we would all be doing it. Most of us have reliable internet connections and don't go out of service often enough to really care about this kind of thing.

Re: Why haven't local-first apps become popular?

#325

Post by justinpombrio »

quotemstr wrote: post #315
kobieps wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed @ not for the faint of heart. There is at least one alternative "CRDT-free" approach for the less brave among us: https://mattweidner.com/2025/05/21/text-without-crdts.html

> Difference from CRDTs The author has made a CRDT. He denies that his algorithm constitutes a CRDT. It's a straightforward merge, not a "fancy algorithm". What specific aspect of a CRDT does this solution not satisfy? The C? The R? The D? The T?

I was going to say that that's not a CRDT because it requires a centralized server (the conflict resolution is "order in which the server received the messages", and clients aren't allowed to share updates with each other, they can only get updates from the server). But now I'm looking at definitions of CRDTs and it's not clear to me whether this is supposed to count or not.

Still, every algorithm that's actually labeled a CRDT shares a magical property: if my replica has some changes, and your replica has some changes, our replicas can share their changes with each other and each converge closer to the final state of the document, even if other people have been editing at the same time, and different subsets of their changes have been shared with you or I. That is, you can apply peoples' changes in any order and still get the same result. I don't think it's useful to call anything without that property a CRDT.

Re: Why haven't local-first apps become popular?

#326

Post by Eisenstein »

jonahx wrote: post #323
dusted wrote: post #234

They used to be really popular, back in the ancient times when I was young and full of excitement for all things compute, almost all software was local-first, and.. only :) But since the entire world economy has turned to purely optimizing for control and profit, there's just no good reason to not screw people over as much and as often as possible, what'll they do ? Switch to someone who won't ? And who would that be…

> there's just no good reason to not screw people over as much and as often as possible, what'll they do ? Switch to someone who won't ? And who would that be ? That argument flies in the face of basic economics. The problem is that the people don't seem to care about being screwed. If they did, it would very profitable to provide the non-screwing, and lots of people would. The optimist in me believes this is a just…

I think you say 'basic economics' but actually mean 'ideal free market'. Economics is the science of economies, which do not have to be free or market based.

The problem with people's basic understanding of free markets is that it is heavily simplified. We are looking at it from the perspective of 'what if human nature wasn't ever a problem, everyone was always perfectly rational, and everyone had all of the information they needed to make a rational decision'. Those criteria do not and have never existed, which is why the free market fails sometimes at doing some basic things.

Don't get me wrong, it is a great idea and it solves all sorts of problems and we should keep using it -- but don't come to the conclusion that because it all works out in the theory part, then if something in the real world is a certain way then we have to accept that it is efficient and inevitable.

Re: Why haven't local-first apps become popular?

#327

Post by Ingon »

dtkav wrote: post #318
xorvoid wrote: post #23

I believe the lack of popularity is more of an economics problem. There are established business models for SaaS apps or freemium with ads. But, the business model for local-first apps is not as lucrative. Those who like the local-first model value features like: data-sovereignty, end-to-end encryption, offline usage, etc. These properties make existing business models hard-to-impossible to apply. My current thinking…

I'm building a file-over-app local-first app call Relay [0] (it makes Obsidian real-time collaborative) and I agree with you. We have a business model that I think is kind of novel (I am biased) -- we split our service into a "global identity layer"/control plane and "Relay Servers" which are open source and self-hostable. Our Obsidian Plugin is also open source. So while we have a SaaS, we encourage our users to sel…

In some ways this reminds me of what I'm trying to do with connet [0] - give users the choice to completely self-host (all is open source), identity host (e.g. control server as cloud solution, host relays themselves) or even full cloud [1].

[0] https://github.com/connet-dev/connet

[1] https://connet.dev

Re: Why haven't local-first apps become popular?

#328

Post by balamatom »

recursivedoubts wrote: post #191
balamatom wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who did what when why? Everyone has understanding of those semantics. It's literally entirely on a computer. If that somehow makes it harder to answer basic human questions about the complex things we're using it for, well that means we've got a problem folks. The problem is with comprehensibility, and it's entrenched (because the only way for a piece of software to outlive its 50 incompatible analogs and reach mass…

also, maybe it's a really hard problem

Given enough people working on a solution, every problem is hard. It's all in how you scope it.

Re: Why haven't local-first apps become popular?

#329

Post by jonahx »

Eisenstein wrote: post #326
jonahx wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there's just no good reason to not screw people over as much and as often as possible, what'll they do ? Switch to someone who won't ? And who would that be ? That argument flies in the face of basic economics. The problem is that the people don't seem to care about being screwed. If they did, it would very profitable to provide the non-screwing, and lots of people would. The optimist in me believes this is a just…

I think you say 'basic economics' but actually mean 'ideal free market'. Economics is the science of economies, which do not have to be free or market based. The problem with people's basic understanding of free markets is that it is heavily simplified. We are looking at it from the perspective of 'what if human nature wasn't ever a problem, everyone was always perfectly rational, and everyone had all of the informat…

You've made a general argument that shows not all theoretical economic theories about free markets can be trusted. Fair enough. But my claim is much narrower.

It merely relies on the love of money of real people in our current economy, and the premise that there is enough information flow that, if people cared, they would find and pay for products that don't screw their privacy, control, etc. I think both those premises are undeniably true.

Re: Why haven't local-first apps become popular?

#330

Post by fragmede »

robenkleene wrote: post #105
jakelazaroff wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't call local Excel/Word/etc "local-first". The "-first" part implies that the network is used for secondary functionality, but the apps you're talking about are fully offline. IMO local-first definitionally requires some form of networked multi-device collaboration or sync.

Excel and Word both support real-time collaboration and sync, e.g., https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/collaborate-on-wo...

Google docs is the gold standard here.
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