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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

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/ https://photostructure.com/

A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
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 6y ago
  > 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.
toast0 6y ago
Local first software makes even more sense on a smartphone than a desktop. My desktop is always network connected, and my internet connection at home is fairly reliable. My smartphone is often in areas with no coverage. There are tons of apps I can't use because they don't keep local data. It would be a perfect time to read and write email, but the platforms that would let you do that are dead.
- mceachen 6y ago
  (there are good imap clients, at least for Android, which support a sometimes-connected network).
- marcinzm 6y ago
  >It would be a perfect time to read and write email, but the platforms that would let you do that are dead. The default mail app on iOS is perfectly capable of locally writing and downloading/reading email. Can't search all of history since that's in the cloud but for recent usage it's fine.

A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago

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 6y ago
> 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.

toast0 6y ago

Local first software makes even more sense on a smartphone than a desktop. My desktop is always network connected, and my internet connection at home is fairly reliable. My smartphone is often in areas with no coverage. There are tons of apps I can't use because they don't keep local data. It would be a perfect time to read and write email, but the platforms that would let you do that are dead.

mceachen 6y ago
(there are good imap clients, at least for Android, which support a sometimes-connected network).
marcinzm 6y ago
>It would be a perfect time to read and write email, but the platforms that would let you do that are dead. The default mail app on iOS is perfectly capable of locally writing and downloading/reading email. Can't search all of history since that's in the cloud but for recent usage it's fine.