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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?

#441

Post by coldtea »

rogerrogerr wrote: post #336
Aurornis wrote: post #311

Earlier 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)

It doesn't scale universely, but it doesn't need to: it only needs to cover a specific company/organization/department. So it's trivial to work at that scale.

Hell, it's so feasible, it can even done manually IRL by some person (like discussions where a person holds the "talking stick" and only there are allowed to speak until they pass it to another person - that's a lock).

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

#442

Post by api »

jjcob wrote: post #90
api wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those technical problems are largely a result of trying to shoehorn collaboration onto older local-only PC era apps that store data in the form of simple files. For really rich collaboration you want something designed for it from the ground up, and Office is not. Office pre-dates even the Internet. That has nothing to do with where the code lives and runs. There are unique technical challenges to doing it all at the…

It's not a technical challenge, it's a fundamental problem. When multiple people work on a document at the same time, you will have conflicts that will become very hard to resolve. I have never seen a good UI for resolving non-trivial changes. There is no way to make this merging easy. The only way to avoid the merge problem is to make sure that the state is synchronised before making changes. With cloud based soluti…

It’s barely different from having multiple fat single page web apps editing a file in the cloud. All of those have local replicas of the data and present as if everyone is editing at once.

There are multiple ways to do this, like CRDTs plus raft based leader signaling for conflict resolution. The latter signaling requires almost no bandwidth. Raft based time skew adjustment works too if your problem domain can accept a small amount of uncertainty.

Like I said a lot of these same kinds of algorithms are used cloud side. All the big cloud stuff you use is a distributed system. Where the code runs is irrelevant. The cloud is just another computer.

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

#443

Post by coldtea »

yccs27 wrote: post #377
appreciatorBus wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In other words, Google sacrifices availability/latency here - they don't accept the request until they can be sure it's still available.

They can accept the request (accept as in receive for processing).

They just can't send the acknowledgement of "succesfully booked" yet.

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

#444

Post by coldtea »

throwaway4226 wrote: post #418
account42 wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or is there a global lock on any transaction affecting a meeting room, so only one goes through? (Feels like it doesn’t scale) Why wouldn't it scale? How many meetings are booked per second in your organization???

I think the potential for abuse is high. With a locking system, someone could (and probably would) click (manually or with a script) on a time slot to "reserve" a room just in case they needed it.

And if they did it a lot, they're scolded or fired.

That's not a real problem - at least not in the "book a corporate meeting room" space.

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

#445

Post by coldtea »

motorest wrote: post #365
Aurornis wrote: post #311

Earlier 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…

> Technically an algorithm that lets the last writer win is a CRDT because there is no conflict. Your comment shows some ignorance and a complete misunderstanding of the problem domain. The whole point of CRDTs is that the set o operations supported is designed to ensure that conflict handling is consistent and deterministic across nodes,and the state of all nodes involved automatically converge to the same state. La…

>Your comment shows some ignorance and a complete misunderstanding of the problem domain

Imagine how better your comment would be if you ommited the above line, which adds nothing to the correction you try to make, but comes off as stand-offish.

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

#446

Post by zelphirkalt »

account42 wrote: post #410
zelphirkalt wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I had to guess, I would say the GP wants to express that the mass of consumers acts in uninformed silly ways, and with such people local-first has a very low adoption rate, because they usually don't spend a thought about their digital foot/fingerprint or who really owns their data or how they do their personal computing and whether they are independent of anyone else in their personal computing. That there is thi…

Is it really a huge part of our society or is it just one that megacorporations amplify as loud as they can because that's how they want people to behave.

That's a good question actually. I don't know for sure. I tend to think, that for many people things like the Internet are mysteriously working and they have no idea how it works, and as a consequence rarely they go further putting up requirements of how it should work for them. They just accept how things online are, status quo of that which is most visible. Ergo complete victims of the network effects in their social bubbles.

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

#448

Post by jwr »

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…

The author also assumes that users are rational, make no mistakes, and there exists a logical non-conflicting ordering of their updates that makes sense. This is naive, speaking from a perspective of someone who has spent the last 10 years supporting a SaaS mostly for engineers.

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

#449

Post by sebastianz »

hnaccountme wrote: post #357

The article is wrong. Its not popular because of greed. We used to have offline everything and everything just worked. Now we are forced to sync with the cloud weather we like it or not. A subscription model shows a continuous cash flow and businesses like that.

People want to sync their data, work on and see the same thing on their phone, their laptop and their desktop. This certainly did not "just work" when "we used to have offline everything".

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

#450

Post by giancarlostoro »

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…

Wouldn't it be less of an issue if you track the change history, and let users pick a specific historical version? Then it doesn't matter who wins, the end-user can go in and change it. Version control is one of the best parts about Google Docs.
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