Local-first software (2019)
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Local-first software (2019)
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Re: Local-first software (2019)
#2Worth a read, and it's had some very active discussions in the past:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19804478 - May 2019, 191 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21581444 - Nov 2019, 241 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23985816 - Jul 2020, 9 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24027663 - Aug 2020, 134 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26266881 - Feb 2021, 90 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31594613 - Jun 2022, 30 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37743517 - Oct 2023, 50 comments
Re: Local-first software (2019)
#3Local first is almost equates to both privacy protective and public software good.
Essentially antithetical to capitalism, especially America's toxic late stage subscription based enshittification.
Which means its typically a labor of love or a government org has a long term understanding of Software as a Infrastructure (as opposed to SaaS)
Re: Local-first software (2019)
#4Local first is almost equates to both privacy protective and public software good. Essentially antithetical to capitalism, especially America's toxic late stage subscription based enshittification. Which means its typically a labor of love or a government org has a long term understanding of Software as a Infrastructure (as opposed to SaaS)
It might be antithetical to rent seeking at best, but capitalism?
Re: Local-first software (2019)
#5The data part aside, and specifically on the platform/functionality side - these cloud/large products unfortunately do offer more powerful/advanced features, or convenience. Be it cloud multi-device functionality that makes moving around and collaborating seamless, or to enterprise products like snowflake and fabric that offers all sorts over a standard mssql db.
I'm personally very against vendor lock in, but there is some value to them.
Re: Local-first software (2019)
#6Anything with online dependencies will necessarily require ongoing upkeep and ongoing costs. If a system is not local-first (or ideally local-only), it’s not designed for long-term dependability.
Connected appliances and cars have got to be the stupidest bit of engineering from a practical standpoint.
Re: Local-first software (2019)
#7Anything with online dependencies will necessarily require ongoing upkeep and ongoing costs. If a system is not local-first (or ideally local-only), it’s not designed for long-term dependability. Connected appliances and cars have got to be the stupidest bit of engineering from a practical standpoint.
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.
Re: Local-first software (2019)
#8Local first is almost equates to both privacy protective and public software good. Essentially antithetical to capitalism, especially America's toxic late stage subscription based enshittification. Which means its typically a labor of love or a government org has a long term understanding of Software as a Infrastructure (as opposed to SaaS)
I think you mean antithetical to corrupted conflict-of-interest capitalism.
Conflict-of-interest transactions have hidden or coercive impact, lined up in favor of the party with stronger leverage. Examples include un-asked and unwanted surveillance of data or activity, coercive use of information, vendor lock in, unwanted artificial product/service dependencies, insertion of unwanted interaction (ads), ...
None of that is inherent to capitalism. They clearly violate the spirit of capitalism, free trade, etc.
It is providers taking advantage of customer lack of leverage and knowledge to extract value that does not reflect the plain transaction actually desired by customers. Done legally but often with surreptitious disclosure or dark pattern permissions, border line legally where customers would incur great costs identify and protest, or plain old illegally but in a hidden manner with a massive legal budget to provide a moat against accountability.
It is tragic that the current generation of Silicon Valley and VC firms have embraced conflict of interest based business models. Due to the amounts of money that scaling "small" conflicts can make. Despite the great damage that we now know scaling up "small" conflicts can do.
That was not always the case.
Re: Local-first software (2019)
#9Cool to see principles behind this, although I think it’s definitely geared towards the consumer space. Shameless self plug, but related: we’re doing this for industrial assets/industrial data currently (www.sentineldevices.com), where the entire training, analysis and decision-making process happens on customer equipment. We don’t even have any servers they can send data to, our model is explicitly geared on everything happening on-device (so the network principle the article discussed I found really interesting). This is to support use cases in SCADA/industrial automation where you just can’t bring data to the outside world. There’s imo a huge customer base and set of use cases that are just casually ignored by data/AI companies because actually providing a service where the customer/user is is too hard, and they’d prefer to have the data come to them while keeping vendor lock-in. The funny part is, in discussions with customers we actually have to lean in and be very clear on “no this is local, there’s no external connectivity” piece, because they really don’t hear that anywhere and sometimes we have to walk them through it step by step to help them understand that everything is happening locally. It also tends to break the brains of software vendors. I hope local-first software starts taking hold more in the consumer space so we can see people start getting used to it in the industrial space.
Re: Local-first software (2019)
#10In 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, electric-sql, and Rocicorp’s Zero. Are there others?