Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google docs is the gold standard here.
Google Docs is not "local" in any meaningful sense of the word.
it's not!
Why haven't local-first apps become popular?
341–350 of 494 posts
Re: Why haven't local-first apps become popular?
#342Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
>Example: two people starting to work on the same task in an offline-enabled task tracker. Wouldn't this just mean both people are working on it? I agree that this means humans intervening.. It sounds like there was a comms breakdown. But rather than doing a first-in-best-dressed, it sounds like accurately recording that both users are in fact working on the same thing is the best option since it surfaces that interv…
Sure. But then you need to notify users when they come back online that there's a conflict, so they can resolve what to do. You likely need to have a report on the frequency of such occasions for the managers, and so on.
These kinds of conflicts simply can not be solved by CRDTs or any other automated process. The application has to be designed around that.
> In principle, local-first to me means each instance (and the actions each user carries out on their instance) is sacrosanct. Server's job is to collate it, not decide what the Truth is (by first-in-best-dressed or otherwise).
This makes sense only for some applications, though.
And we have not yet started talking about permissions, access control, and other nice fun things.
Re: Why haven't local-first apps become popular?
#343Local-first was the first kind of app. Way up into the 2000s, you'd use your local excel/word/etc, and the sync mechanism was calling your file annual_accounts_final_v3_amend_v5_final(3).xls But also nowadays you want to have information from other computers. Everything from shared calendars to the weather, or a social media entry. There's so much more you can do with internet access, you need to be able to access re…
I also suspect it's more portable. You build one site with one API, and then you just interact with that api across all the devices you support. If you write it locally it has to get rewritten for each platform
Websites can be local in the sense of local-first, especially with modern techn like progressive web apps (which allow you to make your webapp work offline).
Re: Why haven't local-first apps become popular?
#344Sometimes I think the way CRDT research formulates the problem, itself obstructs evolution of local-first.
That obsession with Google Docs-like collaborative real-time text editing, a pretty marginal use case, derails the progress from where local-first apps really need it:
- offline-enabled, rather than realtime/collaborated
- branching/undoing/rebasing, rather than combining edits/messages
- help me create conflict-aware user workflows, rather than pursue conflict-free/auto-converging magic
- embeddable database that syncs, not algorithms or data types
CRDT research gives us `/usr/bin/merge` when local-first apps actually need `/usr/bin/git`. I don't care much how good the merge algorithm is, I need what calls it.
Re: Why haven't local-first apps become popular?
#345Most people don’t ask whether an app is local first or cloud first. They just want to know: “Can I open it?” and “Will my data be safe?”
Re: Why haven't local-first apps become popular?
#346I wish we could get app developers to stop going online for every piece of content. Even my Tesla GPS map refuses to cache tiles it already has, so when connectivity goes down, my maps are blank. Or streaming media apps (like Peacock & Kanopy) reloading the previous screen from the server instead of keeping the rendered media list object resident. 95% of the content is already on the device, let's please encourage it…
Google maps (on my Android) actually has offline maps for a while now but you have to manually select the region. And you can cache multiple regions at once. I've used it in the past when driving to national parks and remote areas with no phone network in some spots.
I do appreciate this feature. I wish more apps provided & tested online access.
I have also tested Gaia & All Trails maps online features, and have had mixed results with those.
I just don't think app developers take the time to test their apps in offline or poor connectivity conditions. They are used to testing procedures while using office wifi
Re: Why haven't local-first apps become popular?
#347Earlier quoted context omitted.
Almost every time I see CRDTs mentioned it’s used as a magic device that makes conflicts disappear. The details, of course, are not mentioned. Technically an algorithm that lets the last writer win is a CRDT because there is no conflict. Making a true system that automatically merges data while respecting user intent and expectations can be an extremely hard problem for anything complex like text. Another problem is…
I’ve never really thought about this - how does Outlook handle this? Has anyone received a “sorry, that room you reserved actually wasn’t available; talk to this other dude who reserved it too” message after reserving a meeting room? Or does it just double book the room? Or is there a global lock on any transaction affecting a meeting room, so only one goes through? (Feels like it doesn’t scale)
In Google Workspace, rooms are resources with calendars that can be configured to auto accept any invitation unless they’ve already booked. So it’s basically first come first serve. Even if two people are literally trying to book the room, at the same time, simultaneously, one request will go through first and will be accepted and the second will be declined. I imagine outlook is similar.
Re: Why haven't local-first apps become popular?
#348> 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…
It sort of depends on the owl though, right? If your CRDT is nothing more than a set of tuples updated on the basis of: these are what my peers have... Is there an abyss of complexity that I'm overlooking here or are simple CRDTs in fact quite simple.
Re: Why haven't local-first apps become popular?
#349I am totally sold on local first apps. I think the recent enshitification of many services (which is also inevitable for the new wave of AI services) plus the inherent privacy risks with allowing third parties access to our personal data is no longer a trade-off I am willing to make.
I set up a little Pi NAS and have moved all my git repositories there thanks to gitea (I still mirror to github for community interaction) and am gradually migrating everything to be stored locally with encrypted cloud backups.
I've also been working on a local-first, open-source, eventually consistent password manager[0] (using last write wins) for the last 3 years as I can't think of anything more important that we should have control over.
It will be hard for local-first to become more commonplace as SaaS and cloud has become so entrenched but I will keep forging towards a future where we take back ownership of our personal data.
Re: Why haven't local-first apps become popular?
#350Obsidian.md has over a million users in five years, that sounds fairly popular to me.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-obsidians-contrarian-play...