Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Local-first software (2019)

inkandswitch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 308 posts

Re: Local-first software (2019)

#51

Post by sroussey »

rzzzt wrote: post #16
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…

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/

And RxDB. https://rxdb.info/

Re: Local-first software (2019)

#52

Post by prmoustache »

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…

> Personally, I disagree with this approach. This is trying to solve a business problem (I can't trust cloud-providers)

It is not only a business problem. I stay away from cloud based services not only because of subscription model, but also because I want my data to be safe.

When you send data to a cloud service, and that data is not encrypted locally before being sent to the cloud (a rare feature), it is not a question of if but when that data will be pwned.

Re: Local-first software (2019)

#53

Post by tshaddox »

bboygravity wrote: post #26
api wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The entire thing is because of subscription revenue. It’s self reinforcing because those companies that get subscription revenue have both more revenue and higher valuations enabling more fund raising, causing them to beat out companies that do not follow this model. This is why local first software died.

The root cause of the problem is that it's easier to make personalized stuff with server/backend (?cloud?) than without maybe? Example: I made a firefox extension that automatically fills forms using LLM. It's fully offline (except OPTIONALLY) the LLM part, optionally because it also supports Ollama locally. Now the issue is that it's way too hard for most people to use: find the LLM to run, acquire it somehow (pay t…

> The root cause of the problem is that it's easier to make personalized stuff with server/backend (?cloud?) than without maybe?

That, and also there are real benefits to the end user of having everything persisted in the cloud by default.

Re: Local-first software (2019)

#55

Post by mumbisChungo »

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…

A good contract can help you to seek some restitution if wrongdoing is done and you become aware of it and you can prove it. It won't mechanically prevent the wrongdoing from happening.

Re: Local-first software (2019)

#56

Post by ashdev »

This was refreshing to read! More apps should be local-first. If the user does not want to sync their data to cloud, they should have that option.

I’ve been building the offline-first (or local-first) app Brisqi[0] for a while now, it was designed from the ground up with the offline-first philosophy.

In my view, a local-first app is designed to function completely offline for an indefinite period. The local experience is the foundation, not a fallback and cloud syncing should be a secondary enhancement, not a requirement.

I also don’t consider apps that rely on temporary cache to be offline-first. A true offline-first app should use a local database to persist data. Many apps labeled as “offline-first” are actually just offline-tolerant, they offer limited offline functionality but ultimately depend on reconnecting to the internet.

Building an offline-first app is certainly more challenging than creating an online-only web app. The syncing mechanism must be reliable enough to handle transitions between offline and online states, ensuring that data syncs to the cloud consistently and without loss. I’ve written more about how I approached this in my blog post[1].

[0] https://brisqi.com

[1] https://blog.brisqi.com/posts/how-i-designed-an-offline-firs...

Re: Local-first software (2019)

#57

Post by samwillis »

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) with a technical trade-off (avoid centralized architecture).

I don't think that's quite correct. I think the authors fully acknowledge that the business case for local-first is not complexly solved and is a closely related problem. These issues need both a business and technical solution, and the paper proposes a set of characteristics of what a solution could look like.

It's also incorrect to suggest that local-first is an argument for decentralisation - Martin Kleppmann has explicitly stated that he doesn't think decentralised tech solves these issues in a way that could become mass market. He is a proponent of centralised standardised sync engines that enable the ideals of local-first. See his talk from Local-first conf last year: https://youtu.be/NMq0vncHJvU?si=ilsQqIAncq0sBW95

Re: Local-first software (2019)

#58

Post by samwillis »

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…

Along with the others mentioned, it's worth highlighting Yjs. It's an incredible CRDT toolkit that enables many of the realtime and async collaborative editing experience you want from local-first software.

https://yjs.dev/

Re: Local-first software (2019)

#59

Post by sygned »

I've made a local first, end-to-end encrypted, auto sync bookmark extension that doesn't milk your data in any way. It's 100% private, I even don't use Google analytics on my website. Some of the reasons why I've put some work into this is:

  - because I could not find something similar that doesn't milk and own my data
  - to never lose a bookmark again
  - to have my bookmark data encrypted in the cloud
  - to have private history
  - to have some extra time saving features in the extension that are for unknown reason rare to find
  - more learning and experience (it's acutally quite complex to build this)
After about 4 years of using it daily on every pc I own, I found out it's a pain for me and my family when it is not installed on a browser. I thought; if it's useful for us, it might be useful for others too! So, I decided to make it available by subscription for a small fee to cover the server and other costs. I'm not really into marketing, so almost no one knows it exists. You can find it on markbook.io.
Post reply on HN