[HN Gopher] What if we had Local-First Software?
___________________________________________________________________
What if we had Local-First Software?
Author : adlrocha
Score : 170 points
Date : 2020-10-15 16:10 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (adlrocha.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (adlrocha.substack.com)
| lukeplato wrote:
| A lot of the philosophy is similar to the Solid (Social Linked
| Data) project that Tim Berners-Lee started.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_(web_decentralization_pr...
| space_ghost wrote:
| This is absolute must for any kind of computing activity that's
| not on Earth or in Earth orbit.
| egypturnash wrote:
| Uhhh
|
| Have any of y'all ever heard of something called "Adobe Creative
| Cloud", it's...
|
| It is literally trying to answer most of these questions for a
| set of titanic applications that predate _the entire world wide
| web_ , it solves, offhand, at least five of these seven
| principles - it's (1) built around apps that have been working
| with local files since the eighties, (2) can sync your work
| between multiple devices, I just carry my laptop everywhere so I
| dunno how well it works, haven't played with the iPad apps yet so
| I dunno about those, (3) works just fine with no net access
| (though it'll cut you off if you don't hit the authorization
| servers every few weeks), (4) I am not sure how it solves the
| conflicting changes problem as I work solo, (5) your data's on
| your local device and in Adobe's cloud for as long as you
| subscribe, (6) okay well stuff's probably stored unencrypted,
| unless "I turned on whole disc encryption" counts (7) it's your
| own files and your own backup strategy.
|
| That's five checkboxes out of seven, better than the 4/7 that
| "email shit around" and "github" get.
|
| And it is relentlessly uncool. But it has been here for a good
| while and none of y'all have noticed it because it's built for
| artists.
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _Have any of y 'all ever heard of something called "Adobe
| Creative Cloud", it's..._
|
| ...something that I have to rent and can no longer own.
|
| See also losing user's data:
|
| * https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/20/21377411/adobe-
| lightroom-...
| cactus2093 wrote:
| I completely agree, but I think the days might be numbered.
|
| In Lightroom what you're describing, with the easy to work with
| plain files, is called Lightroom Classic. It's still supported
| alongside regular Lightroom, but it wouldn't be a huge surprise
| if it gets deprecated at some point. It also only works on
| desktop.
|
| What is now called regular Lightroom requires Adobe cloud to
| sync between machines instead of letting you manage your own
| files & syncing, and is the only way to sync between the newer
| iPad version of Lightroom or Photoshop and the desktop.
| reificator wrote:
| I want to own my data _and_ my tools.
|
| I don't want to pay a subscription service to Adobe any more
| than I want to pay a subscription service for my desk and
| chair.
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _I want to own my data_ and* my tools.*
|
| More power to you! But this article is specifically about
| local-first/offline SaaS, which is what Creative Cloud is.
| Xavdidtheshadow wrote:
| The tough thing is that most software products you use are
| actively maintained and updated. That costs them money each
| month, so they pass those costs to you.
|
| It would be great if we could see more software sold as-is,
| without updates. But, especially in the world of online-
| capable tools (which not everything is, but most apps can
| access the internet), ongoing security maintenance is
| important. I'm not sure we can have it both ways.
| rabidrat wrote:
| Too often, those updates _break_ already working tools. I
| don 't need my essential app insisting that I wait 10
| minutes to upgrade when I'm 1 minute away from giving a
| presentation using it.
| 0xffff2 wrote:
| Maybe they don't need to be though. One of my greatest
| regrets is that I couldn't afford to purchase Photoshop and
| Illustrator back when that was still an option. The Adobe
| CS6 suite is software that is "done" as far as I'm
| concerned. I would gladly pay $1000 each for CS6 Photoshop
| and Illustrator with absolutely no future updates if I
| could.
| trotFunky wrote:
| I haven't given it much thought, but I like Jetbrain's
| compromise[0]. You pay a subscription to get all the
| updates, but you get to keep a perpetual license to any
| specific version (major+minor, you still receive bugfixes)
| if it has been covered by your subscription for 12 months
| or more.
|
| This way you can choose to receive updates indefinitely and
| support development with your subscription, or buy/stay
| with a version you are using if you do not need/want the
| newer ones. (Buying an annual subscription grants you the
| perpetual licence immediately apparently, I have no
| experience with this.)
|
| [0] : https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-
| gb/articles/207240845-What...
| Xavdidtheshadow wrote:
| Agreed! I think that's a great model. Panic did the same
| thing recently: https://nova.app/buy/
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _The tough thing is that most software products you use
| are actively maintained and updated. That costs them money
| each month, so they pass those costs to you._
|
| Adobe managed to stay in existence and be profitable for a
| few decades before switching to software rentals.
|
| What changed in the creative space that caused
| 'traditional' software sales to no longer be able to pay
| the bills? And why doesn't that also apply to, say, Capture
| One?
| infogulch wrote:
| > What changed
|
| Businesses often prefer operational expenses over capital
| expenses. What changed is that your average business IT
| (bigcorp or mom's basement) now has reliable access to
| the internet, which means that an operational expense for
| software has just recently become _possible at all_.
| Xavdidtheshadow wrote:
| I was never a paying user of Adobe products, but my
| understanding was that they'd release a new (yearly?)
| version as a paid upgrade. It would presumably have a
| killer feature that would encourage enough of the users
| to buy, which (hopefully) retroactively funds the cost of
| the new version's development.
|
| From the perspective of their business, it's advantageous
| to have the consistency of $X / month forever instead of
| "hopefully a huge yearly sales month, followed by mostly
| nothing until next year". Businesses like predictable
| revenue.
| merb wrote:
| Adobe Creative Cloud is probably the worst sync software I ever
| encountered. On Mac and on Windows. It's probably even way
| worse than a one week demo with Windows Cloud Sync Engines.
| Most Adobe products are crap, slow and have tons of bugs. Their
| specification around pdf is so complex that even adobe reader
| does things differently than the spec.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| Last I checked, creative cloud isn't truly offline first. How
| many times have I opened Illustrator on an airplane, only for
| the creative cloud to completely block opening my local
| application till I don't sign in onto the cloud (mostly to
| verify if I paid for my subscription this month). That's not
| what an offline first software should look like.
| jlongster wrote:
| I have a lot of experience with this having developed a personal
| finance app that is local-first: https://actualbudget.com/
|
| Having all of the data local is a superpower. It changes how you
| build the app, and you just never have to worry about the
| network. Everything is fast _by default_. It's great.
|
| The app uses CRDTs to sync and it's unlocked a lot of powerful
| stuff like a robust undo system. We also offer end-to-end
| encryption.
|
| On the negative side, over time I've stepped back a little from
| being truly local-first. The mobile app used to connect to the
| desktop by pointing the phone's camera at a QR code on desktop,
| and it would literally sync peer-to-peer. Maintaining that was
| nightmare and users had endless networking problems. Our network
| infrastructure unfortunately is not built for truly peer-to-peer
| apps. Maybe ipv6 will help, I don't know. My app now has a
| "centralized" server but it's really just a backup that gives
| some convenience - the app is still totally local but syncs
| through a single server. You can work on it for weeks offline and
| then sync up. In the future when p2p is ready, I'll be ready for
| it.
| MrZander wrote:
| This looks great, do you have a newsletter? I'd love to know
| when you implement bank syncing. That's the only thing keeping
| me from signing up right now.
| wry_discontent wrote:
| I've seen some ways you can hack this functionality together
| with email alerts for any > $0 transaction.
|
| Does Actual expose any api stuff?
| jlongster wrote:
| yep! https://actualbudget.com/docs/developers/using-the-
| API/
| jlongster wrote:
| Thanks! Sort of do but unfortunately you can only subscribe
| to it right now by subscribing to a trial. If you email
| help@actualbudget.com I'll subscribe your email manually.
| Larrikin wrote:
| This looks great and similar to YNAB. Do you feel you offer
| anything over YNAB vs just being local first.
| TimSchumann wrote:
| I've actually been looking for an alternative to YNAB since
| they forced you into a cloud subscription model with data
| hosted on their servers. I mean, they didn't force, but they
| essentially stopped updating the standalone product.
| jlongster wrote:
| Right now, the differences are all in the details (income
| categories, no weird credit card handling, etc), and there
| are many of them. But instead I'll focus on what is to come
| soon:
|
| * A custom rules engine (to be released in a few weeks).
| You'll be able to write a list of conditions for matching
| transactions, and a list of actions to apply when matched.
| The system will automatically encode what it learns as rules
| (apply category X to payee Y) so you can see what it's doing
| and adjust.
|
| * Multiple budget types. Zero-based budgeting is cool, but
| Actual is just a tool for you. If you want, you can use a
| simple report based that just shows income vs expense. You
| choose the type you want adapt it to your lifestyle.
|
| * Custom reports. This is really where having all your data
| local is incredible. You'll be able to write queries into
| your data, process it, and render any kind of visualization.
| boarnoah wrote:
| > You'll be able to write queries into your data, process
| it, and render any kind of visualization.
|
| Now that sounds very cool.
|
| Out of curiosity, do you have any plans to handle things
| that cannot be local first (for example with YNAB I like
| the Plaid Integration to pull transactions data out of
| banking).
|
| Something like that for your application would need to
| clear through your own API right?
| jlongster wrote:
| Yep, bank syncing is going to launch by the end of the
| year.
|
| It's tough. I've wrestled with this for over a year. Bank
| syncing has to come from my server, which means by doing
| so you are giving us access to your transactions. No
| banking provider has any way for clients to contact them
| directly. I think this is possible with the right
| encryption, but nobody is working on it. I've given this
| feedback to Plaid but they don't care.
|
| The majority of people need the convenience of syncing
| though. So I plan to launch it, and it'll go through my
| server, and I plan to communicate clearly the privacy
| that you are giving up by doing so.
| throw0101a wrote:
| Personally, if I can get a YNAB4-equivalent that will work
| with macOS 10.15+ I'd be very happy. (YNAB4 is 32-bit only,
| and YNAB5 is subscription--and since I have no need for the
| cloud stuff I refuse to rent it; I do have a license for
| YNAB4.)
| avrionov wrote:
| The app looks great. What technologies did you use to develop
| it?
| cw wrote:
| I cannot imagine my life without Actual. Bookkeeping is such a
| joy with this tool. I've used Acutal for more than a year to
| manage the budget for two companies and my personal finances.
| Highly highly recommend.
| jlongster wrote:
| Wow, that's really great to hear! There's so much more I'm
| excited to build into it, so it will only get better.
| Something I'm most excited about is custom reports. Having
| all your data local is going to make those super powerful.
| phkahler wrote:
| Who mentioned Actual? Is this a pair of advertising comments?
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > Maintaining that was nightmare and users had endless
| networking problems. Our network infrastructure unfortunately
| is not built for truly peer-to-peer apps
|
| What causes these problems? NAT?
| jlongster wrote:
| Yep, that and public routers blocking types of protocols.
| There was a phase where I switched to using mDNS
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicast_DNS) so you didn't
| need a QR code, which discovers other devices. Turns out most
| public wifis (coffee shops) flat out block it.
| bitz-please wrote:
| What protocol were you using before that? Had you looked at
| using webrtc?
| sebmellen wrote:
| WebRTC is a horribly fantastic mess of complexity which
| is very hard to work with without using a third-party
| provider like https://simplewebrtc.com. Your head will be
| swimming with acronyms like ICE, TURN, STUN, etc. before
| you even understand the basic signalling mechanisms.
| [deleted]
| junon wrote:
| We've come full circle. The web developers are starting to
| realize there's a whole operating system underneath the browser
| that might actually be of some use.
| jka wrote:
| I'd be very curious to know what percentage of total aggregate
| CPU and memory resources are in the hands of everyday people
| (in smartphones) compared to in datacentres.
| saalweachter wrote:
| 1 gigabyte over a billion cellphones turns into a exabyte, so
| I would guess, similar orders of magnitude?
| qsort wrote:
| Web applications can be run locally.
|
| As much as it's easy to shit on the web stack, it solved a real
| problem, namely the 'operating systems underneath' being
| absolute clusterfucks at least as much as the web. It's really
| sad that the only way to reliably access something from
| multiple devices and locations are websites.
|
| Ironically, if we're ever going to see something like the OP
| wants, it's 100% going to be locally-run webapps. Whether we
| like it or not, think it's right or not, it's clear by now that
| the average joe is not going to learn tools like git.
| thsealienbstrds wrote:
| OSes may be technical clusterfucks. However, the most
| important thing imho is that all this shit is running on a
| stack that's robust against vendor lock-in. That's easier
| with a smaller stack since you have less vendors to worry
| about. LFSFS (local-first software from scratch), if you
| will.
| wrnr wrote:
| That's why I am so exited about gioui.org because it'll allow
| native applications for OSX, Windows, Linux (both X11 and
| Wayland), iOS, android and (sortof) webASM.
|
| It is a simple wrapper around the input devices like mouse,
| keyboard and touch screen and outputs the graphics using GPU
| shaders (DirectX, OpenGL, Metal). It feels like a mix between
| a 2D game engine and a UI library.
|
| The immediate mode architecture is a mindfuck how easy it is
| compared to (functional) reactive programming. You basically
| get all the benefits of having observers of values with just
| values.
| nine_k wrote:
| The usual problems are caused by the non-native controls:
| no built-in affordances like spell checking and all the OS-
| specific behaviors, no easy way to plug in accessibility,
| and the non-native look and feel.
|
| All this is totally fine for a game UI, and is a much
| harder sell for productivity software.
| wrnr wrote:
| Thats a little bit unfair, even the W3C's web-agency has
| a hard time building an accessible website and needed
| spend two weeks (of billable time) reviewing different
| web frameworks because of it:
|
| https://w3c.studio24.net/updates/on-not-choosing-
| wordpress/
| nine_k wrote:
| Not that many people need accessibility. About 100% of
| people need spell-checking, though.
| OnlyOneCannolo wrote:
| Certain types of automation and testing are often built
| on top of accessibility features. Accessibility doesn't
| just mean accessible to the disabled. It also means
| accessible to your code.
| p_l wrote:
| Exactly. And people forget that depending on the UI
| libraries you use, you might get a mostly accessible app
| by default. All of core Windows widget classes, and
| WinForms and WFP, support accessibility features. Worst
| case you have a somewhat broken object tree without good
| labels, but that's already a start.
|
| Dealing with something that believed it only needs a
| canvas to draw on is PITA.
| knubie wrote:
| I've tried to follow this approach with my own app[0]. An account
| is optional, and a subscription plan is available to sync your
| data across devices.
|
| There have definitely been some challenges with this approach,
| from available tech stacks to customer support, And user
| expectations. There were also some unexpected upsides, like
| requiring less server resources. All in all I think it was worth
| it and I hope this trend continues.
|
| [0] https://mochi.cards/
| danschumann wrote:
| What does this look like for email? Do we have to trust a
| particular email account for everything?
| 205guy wrote:
| Ummm, IMAP? Reading the article, this was my first thought:
| email applications like IMAP clients that work offline are the
| perfect example of this philosophy.
|
| If you can't access your mail provider, you still have all the
| data from the last time you did, you can search old emails
| because they're stored locally (you can set how much you want
| to keep for these situations), and you can write an email and
| it will be stored in the outbox to be sent when connectivity is
| restored. In other words, your email experience is exactly the
| same as with connectivity, except for a banner that reminds you
| that it hasn't been able to download new mail since HH:mm.
| roughly wrote:
| The basic problem here is not a tech problem, it's a business
| problem.
|
| Your data is siloed inside a cloud-only app because it means
| you'll keep paying for it. You can't export it or share it to
| other apps because that'd be competition for the service you're
| paying for. It's online-only because it makes the entire service
| useless once you stop paying.
|
| There's technical solutions for this, and they'll get no traction
| whatsoever so long as it's more profitable to keep people locked
| into a cloud-based service.
| pjfin123 wrote:
| Plug for my open source "local-first" alternative to Google
| Translate (https://github.com/argosopentech/argos-translate). It
| has a Google Translate like GUI and lets you install packages to
| support translating between different languages.
|
| It currently doesn't have the ability to go to web services for
| translations you don't have installed locally but that's a
| feature I'm considering adding at some point. It would seem like
| the best way to do this we be to track (locally) which
| translations you use frequently and then save them locally (a one
| way translation package between two languages is ~100MB). This
| would give you the privacy/offline access of translating locally
| for language pairs you frequently use, while also seamlessly
| supporting the large number of languages supported by cloud
| services. You could also give power users much more fine-grained
| control over which translations they keep saved locally.
| meagher wrote:
| Good read with similar ideas and same name
| https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first.html
| mceachen wrote:
| I've been soaking in this space for the past couple years as I've
| developed PhotoStructure, a local-first photo and video manager
| [1]. _I have opinions._
|
| While I'm certainly sold, personally, on local-first software
| (obviously), I think it's going to become an increasingly harder
| sell for Normal People. 15 years ago, a large percentage of
| households had at least one desktop or laptop, as it was the only
| way to get on to the internet.
|
| As smartphones have taken that place for most people, nowadays if
| you've got a desktop, it's likely only for gaming, and most
| commonly-purchased laptops (esp that don't come with Windows)
| have stagnated in performance and capability, as their companies
| push people to use their cloud service offerings. NAS devices
| seem to remain niche products. This drove me to have to support
| _everything_ : Windows, macOS, Linux desktops, and everything
| that can run Docker. I've been very surprised to find an almost
| perfect split of users for each edition (desktop vs docker).
|
| Given the popularity of personal-information-selling social
| platforms (however it may be waning), I don't think most people
| are concerned about privacy to give up (almost any) convenience.
| I'd love to be wrong. I'm hoping to make something easy enough to
| install and live with that it isn't an inconvenience, but it's
| hard to compete against enjoying someone else's infrastructure
| and application management teams, for "free" (where "free" ===
| all of your personal information and telemetry).
|
| (For what it's worth, PhotoStructure only runs on hardware you
| own, and none of your data leaves your computer, except for error
| reporting, and even that can be disabled).
|
| [1] https://photostructure.com/
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| Your product looks interesting to me. My minor beef is with
| recurring annual subscription ( assuming no updates, I just
| want to pay once ). I do like the idea though.
| mceachen wrote:
| > assuming no updates
|
| Know that the free tier will still open and browse existing
| libraries: I'm not going to hold anyone's library hostage in
| exchange for a subscription.
| [deleted]
| dragontamer wrote:
| > How would an offline-first Internet look like?
|
| Did people not grow up on Juno Email services?
|
| Oh wow. An entire generation of modern computer users never had
| the opportunity, did they? You'd connect to the internet to
| download your email, then you disconnected (otherwise, you'd use
| up too much of your phone line and get a big phone bill).
|
| The POP3 protocol still works. You can still get Mozilla
| Thunderbird and grab POP3-style emails from GMail or whatever.
| But people want IMAP instead, an always-connected model provides
| better idea of which emails were "read" or "not read", for
| example.
|
| Ex: You may download all emails on your Phone, but maybe Email#0
| is never opened on your phone. If you used POP3, you don't know
| if Email#0 was read or not, the protocol just assumed you read
| it.
|
| -------
|
| How did forums work back then? Through USENET. A similar concept,
| where you'd download the messages, then disconnect from the
| internet as you read all the updates.
|
| BBS machines however were online-only, and the start of real-time
| collaboration IIRC (not that I ever used BBS, but that's my
| understanding of that old telnet technology). I don't know the
| history: whether BBS or IRC came first (or which was popular
| first...)
|
| The "Killer App" for the internet, AOL Email / Juno Email / etc.
| etc. was offline-first, by and large. At least, to me (a good ol'
| "Eternal September" user who joined the internet community well
| after 1993).
|
| --------
|
| Anyway, you'd read and write emails while offline. Then you'd hit
| "send", which would boot up the modem, take over your phone line
| (woops, Mom's talking on the phone. Sorry mom!!). Wait for Mom to
| get off the phone, THEN you connect to the internet...
| snow_mac wrote:
| > How would an offline-first Internet look like?
|
| 1Password comes to mind. If you sign up for the subscription, you
| can easily access it offline, sync to the cloud now or later.
| Enable 2factor, and you can still access the vault offline, want
| to sync with the cloud? Enter the 2factor ID and you're in
| business.
|
| > Your Work Is Not Trapped on One Device
|
| Microsoft Office does a great job with this and office 365. You
| have the powerful Word running locally, saving both on disk and
| virtually in the cloud. But then if you switch machines, want to
| use in the browser? Easy no problem
|
| > Seamless collaboration
|
| Doesn't Git solve this problem?
| geff82 wrote:
| Concerning O365, is it only me who thinks they have invested
| exactly zero to make Word Online actually display a document
| that has even the slightest complicated formatting correctly?
| Documents that are displayed horribly in Word Online actually
| work quite well in Nextcloud/Collabora online.
| suprfnk wrote:
| >> Seamless collaboration
|
| > Doesn't Git solve this problem?
|
| The author mentions that:
|
| "The collaboration approach that I personally like the most
| (and the one I feel could be embedded in "local-first
| applications") is the one used by git."
| Sodaware wrote:
| I remember Microsoft pushing hybrid apps called "Smart Clients"
| back in 2003.
| bhauer wrote:
| I have a vision of computing that I call "personal application
| omnipresence" (PAO) [1] where applications are singular instances
| that you interact with concurrently from any device. Notionally,
| it's similar to having multiple "views" in a MVC architecture,
| and allowing each of those views to adapt to the capabilities of
| the device displaying the view.
|
| The article linked here talks at length about concurrent edits
| and the data structures necessary to handle work by multiple
| application instances. I feel this is (potentially) unnecessary
| effort. Rather than build applications to support concurrent
| edits by fat clients, use thin clients that all speak to the same
| instance of the application with its singular state. Concurrent
| work would therefore be resolved in real-time by a single
| application instance in a first-come-first-served basis, without
| any complex data structures or clever coding.
|
| The root of so much complexity in modern computing is that all of
| us have multiple application instances when virtually nobody
| actually wants this. I don't want a separate email client on
| every device. I want a single email client that I can attach
| views to and interact with from anywhere.
|
| [1] https://tiamat.tsotech.com/pao
| daleharvey wrote:
| People couldn't sell adverts?
|
| Working on PouchDB I spent a good amount of time thinking about
| how to "sell" local / offline first apps. It seemed a lot to me
| like the problem was plain old capitalism, offline / local first
| software is faster / and more robust, for most circumstances its
| a better decision for the user. However the economic incentives
| arent there to build the best software, the economic incentives
| are to slow webpages to a crawl with adverts and planned
| obsolescence.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| Slowing to a crawl is counterproductive greed essentially as it
| repels the user base and doesn't aid sales. Google won out with
| text adds as opposed to "punch the monkey" autoplay banner
| crap.
|
| Aside from that there is the issue of portability which comes
| with the power - namely supporting everything and barrier to
| entry. But the bigger difference is probably convenience. Web
| typically needs no install and less commitment and gives a
| single set of servers to work on for everybody.
|
| Take a general referral/word of mouth. Web has more or less "go
| to the URL and try it with no commmitments or extra steps" and
| web shopping found not needing to register was crucial for
| people actually trying. Now compare local first "Hey you should
| try and download Notepad++/git/etc." And that is before IT
| policies or licenses get involved which can mean a certain
| segment get a hard block they wouldn't for a web service unless
| they specifically decided that say "pastebin is a hard no" and
| then missed that the new hotness is say clipboard.com anyway.
|
| We had an approach which tried for its own best of both worlds
| with its own sandbox and that was in browser Java applets.
| sylvain_kerkour wrote:
| I tried to create a collaborative (the most important point),
| local-first, end-to-end encrypted app.
|
| I really tried. But it's hard, really hard. Like all distributed
| systems.
|
| CRDTs are far from a panacea:
|
| * No implementation is compatible with another
|
| * There is very few implementation in languages that are not JS.
|
| * The biggest problem is when 2 documents are diverging for too
| much time (think a blockchain fork) like if you go offline for 4
| days while your coworker work on the same document as you do. You
| have to come back to differential sync, like Git.
|
| And it's just for sync, then to move to P2P you have to handle
| NAT traversals, distributed identities, rendez-vous places and
| much more.
| LukeEF wrote:
| You speak my pain... took so much pain to overcome these
| problems when delivering TerminusDB... taking best ideas from
| blockchain, git and rolling them all together... this white
| paper we wrote might remind you of past suffering...
| https://github.com/terminusdb/terminusdb-server/blob/dev/doc...
| LukeEF wrote:
| TerminusDB and Hub (co-founder here) is offline first open source
| data collaboration software. We built the service so you can work
| offline for as long as you want and then resync when you're
| online again. We always felt this was the most important aspect
| of collaboration - you don't want to just update a common live
| view like google sheets, you want to go away make mistakes, fix
| them and merge when ready. We are also in-memory, so we put a lot
| of effort into compression, which worked out great as we can use
| your regular machine for the compute. Download the analytic
| engine, link to the hub and you can share data free and easy.
| Obviously talking my book, but a great backend for lots of this
| sort of collaborative local-first software (we're a DBMS at the
| end of the day). Will be rolling out p2p soon I hope - so going
| from GitHub for data to napster for data! #LivingTheDream
| https://terminusdb.com/hub/
| wrs wrote:
| This is kind of funny because of course _everything_ before about
| 2001 was "local first". There have been multiple generations of
| patterns for connecting a local app to a network for
| collaboration, so there is a lot of history to check out. Ray
| Ozzie's Groove was the closest thing I can remember to this: a
| local object store with P2P and central-store connectivity, based
| on a common synchronization algorithm. CRDTs have come a long way
| so that may be an important new angle.
| SolarNet wrote:
| This is a big one for me. But I think there is a missing level
| here. Local as in area, not just local to the machine.
|
| Municipal and Neighborhood level networks would solve a lot of
| problems inherent in the broader internet, as well as making
| solving problems as discussed by the OP easier.
|
| For example, it's a lot easier to trust your neighbor than
| someone on the internet (and better too). For one you can look
| them in the eyes and shake their hand, for another you are both
| governed by the same court (though this does make privacy more
| locally relevant). On the flip-side this means local people don't
| necessarily have to be great at the internet themselves to use
| these complex hosted programs. It's just another website rather
| than setting up a google docs server or using a git repo.
|
| Continuing, another problem it solves is local discoverability.
| There are a thousand products out there that do local services,
| from craigslist, on down to "local wikis". But these services
| don't often care about your community, and it can be hard to know
| what other people are using (separating local efforts across a
| global network). Putting them all on a local network, with a
| local index (and search engines) allows better discoverability
| nearby (especially if portals into neighboring communities can be
| connected, eventually perhaps into a federation of sorts), but
| also services that are oriented to local needs (and issues and
| regulation).
|
| I'm not saying this would replace the internet. Obviously not.
| But it would provide a better, safer, and more useful "local
| layer" of the internet to go to first (to say nothing of the
| social media security and child safety aspects). That also
| happened to be faster and more resilient (doesn't go down when
| the internet does). The problem of course is shit ISPs, though
| this is why the MeshNet people do what they do. And having
| applications and a community ready for it. The technology (and
| culture) would also be useful for communities that can't
| participate in the global network, from isolated communities
| (either due to poverty, authoritarinism, or remoteness) to future
| ones (spaceships, remote colonies).
|
| Just a thought.
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| Reminds me of when broadband was rolled out in Romania in the
| early millennium, and the local ISP would give you details for
| a server where you could share films and music with people from
| the same city.
| Animats wrote:
| We should at least have local software for home automation. It
| should not be necessary to go out to "the cloud" to set the
| thermostat or turn on the lights.
| anarchogeek wrote:
| We've built a local first social media app, planetary.social,
| it's in testflight, but go to bit.ly/planetarytesting to join.
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