8 ms·

Isn't the direction we're taking with networking and connectivity kind of making this irrelevant? I always feel like local-first is a good idea but I am actuall

Isn't the direction we're taking with networking and connectivity kind of making this irrelevant? I always feel like local-first is a good idea but I am actually never without internet connection, and building a truly local-first anything is significantly more complicated than the alternative of "always online" for most domains, even if you use various helper libs. A lot of the pages talk about privacy reasons as well, but I don't get that either, if you want privacy then you want encryption, not local-first development. Finally, in the end what you want to do with your work is to share it, meaning that "doing" your work is for a large part "sharing" your work, which is fundamentally not local-first. Maybe I am the odd one out here.

realPubkey 4y ago
It is not about being offline. It is more about running queries locally which makes them fast enough that you do not even need a loading spinner [1]. Imagine your whatsapp client would have to do a http request on each UI interaction. [1] https://rxdb.info/offline-first.html https://rxdb.info/offline-first.html
- dmak 4y ago
  That sounds exactly like offline capabilities?
- vouwfietsman 4y ago
  The thing I'm missing in this discussion is that there's very few people out there making whatsapp or figma. The vast majority of software development is perfectly served by submitting forms, as mind-numbingly boring as that sounds I think its true. I feel like the primary challenge of the field of software development is actually to guard simplicity. Local-first becoming a standard is not unlike SPA becoming the standard: it hurts simplicity and digs the hole we are in deeper still. To help with this, I think any new technology proposed should advertise when it should NOT be used. In this case, I think, this disclaimer should probably say: "most of the time, for most applications, this should not be used".
wellpast 4y ago
Local-first goes beyond privacy and offline, but nevertheless I think it serves those goals better in fairly obvious ways. I'm a programmer and artist that works with various non local-first tools (ranging from project management/task collaboration, diagramming, programming--iterating and generating code, etc) and the thing I want more than anything is the fast, tightly integrated experience you get from desktop apps. (The web tech stack is all oriented around consumer-first and not producer-first.) We need a streamlined tech stack for desktop-first applications. Which probably involves a p2p (*ish) connection and sharing mechanism (nostr looks interesting for this), CRDTs or other patterns, and -- why is this so friggin hard -- tools, frameworks and libraries for cross-platform desktop apps (and don't say you can't retain OS-specific touchpoints when doing this).
- KrugerDunnings 4y ago
  Why would you need CRDT for this traditional OT, this always turns into some weird political debate about decentralisations. The complexity has not necessarily something to do with consensus algo, where CRDT are not best in class, but what if your creative app is using some compute shader for some visual effect? This is not possible without WebGPU, and then still someone has to do the work of porting all of this.
  - worksonmine 4y ago
    Why is not wanting every action one takes on the web getting collected, analyzed and sold considered a "weird political debate"?
    - ianopolous 4y ago
      100% agree. I want a web where using web apps is private by default. Been working on an attempt to move towards this: https://peergos.org/posts/a-better-web https://peergos.org/posts/a-better-web
- iamwil 4y ago
  What kind of tight integrated experience are you imagining? Is it integration with 3rd party API services? Or with other desktop apps on the same local computer? Or something else?
bob1029 4y ago
I agree with this sentiment. Our networks are only getting faster. Keeping 100% of the application state in exactly one place can eliminate entire universes of problems. If you are building an app that doesn't actually need to talk to outside things, then sure. Go 100% client-side. The dragon is having 1 foot in each swimming pool. 50/50 state spread evenly across client & server.
- hem777 4y ago
  How about having the state 100% on server AND on client? No dragons, no problems.
  - treis 4y ago
    Keeping them in sync is the dragon
    - mlajtos 4y ago
      CRDT is the dragon slayer
      - iamwil 4y ago
        It's the sword that we needed! But it doesn't take us all the way. There are semantic conflicts that are difficult for CRDTs to solve alone.
        hem777 4y ago
        What are the semantic conflicts you mean here? As far as I can tell, CRDTs are the correct solution for syncing state between parties.
        towawy 4y ago
        Merge conflicts that must be resolved by the user (i.e. when there is no logical way to determine the priority of two offline changes) are still an application specific problem, even with CRDTs. You can build structures that allow storing conflict resolutions in CRDTs, but getting them right is still like half the problem to solve.
franky47 4y ago
Saying that offline, local-first apps aren't relevant because "almost everyone is always online" rings similar to saying accessibility isn't relevant because almost everyone can use their eyes. As for sharing, that's very much application dependent: personal data could benefit from being shared across a user's device, but not with third parties.
- jakelazaroff 4y ago
  > Saying that offline, local-first apps aren't relevant because "almost everyone is always online" rings similar to saying accessibility isn't relevant because almost everyone can use their eyes. It’s true, and that “almost” is smaller than you think! There’s a concept called temporary disability which shifts the meaning of “disability” from “some permanent crippling condition” to “unable to do X thing in a given moment”.[1] For example, one place I regularly go without reliable Internet is… the subway! There’s no signal between stations, so if I need access to something I have to make sure it’s downloaded first. My grocery store also has a basement with no cell reception. Imagine if the notes app with my grocery list required an Internet connection! [1] https://mas.to/@carnage4life/109840772570956275 https://mas.to/@carnage4life/109840772570956275
sekao 4y ago
Think about longevity. Whether I'm writing, drawing, making music, or anything else important to my life, will I still be able to view/edit that data in 20 years? Granted, even with offline-friendly software I may need to port it to new platforms and make sure I back up the data, but at least I have a chance. The data I still have from 20 years ago is far more precious to me than I thought it would be back then. Data that can only be accessed through an external party is ephemeral and it will inevitably disappear one day.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- fauigerzigerk 4y ago
  You are right to talk about the data first and foremost. 20 year old software is very rarely useful (yes there are exceptions) but the data is often just as valuable as before or even more so. That is why I much prefer a web app that lets me download my data in an open and well documented format to a desktop app that locks my data into some obscure proprietary format or even into a particular device.
mkraft 4y ago
It’s not only about being able to operate disconnected for long periods it’s also about handling network partitions and being able to achieve consensus without a single source node.
darau1 4y ago
> I am actually never without internet connection You are part of a very small minority. The fact is, the majority of the world can't always be online, and so can't be properly served by always-online applications.
- pocketarc 4y ago
  For me, getting on a train in the UK is enough to break almost every app. I’m “technically” connected but signal can be spotty at times, with massive latency spikes and packet drops, and any kind of interaction that depends on the network will stall, which is incredibly frustrating. Every time I’m in that situation (or get on a plane), I’m reminded of the value of local-first software.
  - Hackbraten 4y ago
    Similar experience in Germany – even inside metropolitan areas inhabited by millions.
vidarh 4y ago
I'm without internet connection multiple times a week on average because mobile networks are far from flawless (I live in that very rural place where you'd expect to not have regular connectivity called London). I don't necessarily care so much about "true" local first as 1) something where at least some care has been taken to ensure it can keep working while offline, 2) with respect to privacy, I halfway agree with you, but bigger than privacy to me is portability, for example if it turns out I can't trust the current provider. But defaulting to not shipping my data to a server somewhere is a good way of increasing trust. That said, I want encryption too.
locustous 4y ago
> building a truly local-first anything is significantly more complicated than the alternative of "always online" for most domains It is more complicated. It works best when the user has a distinct data bucket that is exclusively theirs. A note taking app. Personal finance. But they may have multiple devices so syncing is desirable. This use case is reasonably common and turns out to be relatively simple to do. If you have shared data between users. If you have a significant amount of data that just requires being online to interact with the system. Then it has pretty minimal benefits over just centralizing the data and it should be avoided to minimize complexity.
- Falkon1313 4y ago
  >But they may have multiple devices so syncing is desirable. USB cables or thumbdrives make that a snap, and you don't have to rely on some flaky third-party system or a network connection. It's all 100% under your control 100% of the time. Really, social interactive shared things are the only things where it ever makes sense to be online-first. For everything else, native is way better in every possible way. Speed, security, ability to still access it in the future, etc. It's good to have online backups in case your house burns down. But that's still second-tier to having local backups.
  - gbalduzzi 4y ago
    I would hate and never use an utility app that requires me to constantly physically connect my devices in order to keep data in sync.
crispinb 4y ago
With waves of climate change disasters sweeping at an increasing rate across the world, and resulting wars being almost inevitable in the next few decades, you are unlikely to have always-on internet for the entirety of your life. My region (first world, in a wealthy nation) has had its infrastructure (roads and comms alike) largely destroyed twice in the last year or so. As we're rich, it gets built back, but that takes time. I've been stung enough from weeks'-long outages and periods of isolation to never again completely rely on an internet connection. I do use software that requires a connection, but not for anything critical.
LAC-Tech 4y ago
Been involved in projects like software adoption in remote aid posts in Papua New Guinea that don't even have roads, and Agtech apps in deep rural Australia. Even with Starlink there will still be places that stuff needs to work offline.
nicbou 4y ago
If you travel, you'll constantly experience no or degraded internet access. Airports, trains, hotel Wi-Fi, rural areas, etc. It heavily influenced how I work and which tools I use.
Falkon1313 4y ago
>building a truly local-first anything is significantly more complicated than the alternative of "always online" Wow. That is so incredibly wrong. People have been building local-first software twice as long as the internet has even been publicly accessible at all. The tools to build local native apps, the UI for them, and the libraries that they can use, are all still decades ahead of the web-first tools. I say this as someone who has spent the last 15 years building web apps. We haven't even reached parity with 1995-era desktop apps yet. We're only barely beginning to approach that level of usability and functionality now. And with radically more complexity to do so. (And worse performance.) Building native desktop software without having any dependence on being online all the time and dependence on having high bandwidth and dependence on a good signal is worlds simpler than developing software that depends on all that extra stuff. All that stuff that is out of your control.
- pharmakom 4y ago
  It is more complicated. If you can accept an always online / always connected model then you can guarantee more things because there is only one source of truth (the server). The reason to care about local first is that even today, it’s hard to guarantee a server will always be connected and that model has some privacy and scalability challenges.
ssss11 4y ago
Many people are not online all the time. Many people don’t want to share all of their data and would like to keep some local.

realPubkey 4y ago

It is not about being offline. It is more about running queries locally which makes them fast enough that you do not even need a loading spinner [1]. Imagine your whatsapp client would have to do a http request on each UI interaction. [1] https://rxdb.info/offline-first.html https://rxdb.info/offline-first.html

dmak 4y ago
That sounds exactly like offline capabilities?
vouwfietsman 4y ago
The thing I'm missing in this discussion is that there's very few people out there making whatsapp or figma. The vast majority of software development is perfectly served by submitting forms, as mind-numbingly boring as that sounds I think its true. I feel like the primary challenge of the field of software development is actually to guard simplicity. Local-first becoming a standard is not unlike SPA becoming the standard: it hurts simplicity and digs the hole we are in deeper still. To help with this, I think any new technology proposed should advertise when it should NOT be used. In this case, I think, this disclaimer should probably say: "most of the time, for most applications, this should not be used".

wellpast 4y ago

Local-first goes beyond privacy and offline, but nevertheless I think it serves those goals better in fairly obvious ways. I'm a programmer and artist that works with various non local-first tools (ranging from project management/task collaboration, diagramming, programming--iterating and generating code, etc) and the thing I want more than anything is the fast, tightly integrated experience you get from desktop apps. (The web tech stack is all oriented around consumer-first and not producer-first.) We need a streamlined tech stack for desktop-first applications. Which probably involves a p2p (*ish) connection and sharing mechanism (nostr looks interesting for this), CRDTs or other patterns, and -- why is this so friggin hard -- tools, frameworks and libraries for cross-platform desktop apps (and don't say you can't retain OS-specific touchpoints when doing this).

KrugerDunnings 4y ago
Why would you need CRDT for this traditional OT, this always turns into some weird political debate about decentralisations. The complexity has not necessarily something to do with consensus algo, where CRDT are not best in class, but what if your creative app is using some compute shader for some visual effect? This is not possible without WebGPU, and then still someone has to do the work of porting all of this.
- worksonmine 4y ago
  Why is not wanting every action one takes on the web getting collected, analyzed and sold considered a "weird political debate"?
  - ianopolous 4y ago
    100% agree. I want a web where using web apps is private by default. Been working on an attempt to move towards this: https://peergos.org/posts/a-better-web https://peergos.org/posts/a-better-web
iamwil 4y ago
What kind of tight integrated experience are you imagining? Is it integration with 3rd party API services? Or with other desktop apps on the same local computer? Or something else?

bob1029 4y ago

I agree with this sentiment. Our networks are only getting faster. Keeping 100% of the application state in exactly one place can eliminate entire universes of problems. If you are building an app that doesn't actually need to talk to outside things, then sure. Go 100% client-side. The dragon is having 1 foot in each swimming pool. 50/50 state spread evenly across client & server.

hem777 4y ago
How about having the state 100% on server AND on client? No dragons, no problems.
- treis 4y ago
  Keeping them in sync is the dragon
  - mlajtos 4y ago
    CRDT is the dragon slayer
    - iamwil 4y ago
      It's the sword that we needed! But it doesn't take us all the way. There are semantic conflicts that are difficult for CRDTs to solve alone.
      - hem777 4y ago
        What are the semantic conflicts you mean here? As far as I can tell, CRDTs are the correct solution for syncing state between parties.
        towawy 4y ago
        Merge conflicts that must be resolved by the user (i.e. when there is no logical way to determine the priority of two offline changes) are still an application specific problem, even with CRDTs. You can build structures that allow storing conflict resolutions in CRDTs, but getting them right is still like half the problem to solve.

franky47 4y ago

Saying that offline, local-first apps aren't relevant because "almost everyone is always online" rings similar to saying accessibility isn't relevant because almost everyone can use their eyes. As for sharing, that's very much application dependent: personal data could benefit from being shared across a user's device, but not with third parties.

jakelazaroff 4y ago
> Saying that offline, local-first apps aren't relevant because "almost everyone is always online" rings similar to saying accessibility isn't relevant because almost everyone can use their eyes. It’s true, and that “almost” is smaller than you think! There’s a concept called temporary disability which shifts the meaning of “disability” from “some permanent crippling condition” to “unable to do X thing in a given moment”.[1] For example, one place I regularly go without reliable Internet is… the subway! There’s no signal between stations, so if I need access to something I have to make sure it’s downloaded first. My grocery store also has a basement with no cell reception. Imagine if the notes app with my grocery list required an Internet connection! [1] https://mas.to/@carnage4life/109840772570956275 https://mas.to/@carnage4life/109840772570956275

sekao 4y ago

Think about longevity. Whether I'm writing, drawing, making music, or anything else important to my life, will I still be able to view/edit that data in 20 years? Granted, even with offline-friendly software I may need to port it to new platforms and make sure I back up the data, but at least I have a chance. The data I still have from 20 years ago is far more precious to me than I thought it would be back then. Data that can only be accessed through an external party is ephemeral and it will inevitably disappear one day.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
fauigerzigerk 4y ago
You are right to talk about the data first and foremost. 20 year old software is very rarely useful (yes there are exceptions) but the data is often just as valuable as before or even more so. That is why I much prefer a web app that lets me download my data in an open and well documented format to a desktop app that locks my data into some obscure proprietary format or even into a particular device.

mkraft 4y ago

It’s not only about being able to operate disconnected for long periods it’s also about handling network partitions and being able to achieve consensus without a single source node.

darau1 4y ago

> I am actually never without internet connection You are part of a very small minority. The fact is, the majority of the world can't always be online, and so can't be properly served by always-online applications.

pocketarc 4y ago
For me, getting on a train in the UK is enough to break almost every app. I’m “technically” connected but signal can be spotty at times, with massive latency spikes and packet drops, and any kind of interaction that depends on the network will stall, which is incredibly frustrating. Every time I’m in that situation (or get on a plane), I’m reminded of the value of local-first software.
- Hackbraten 4y ago
  Similar experience in Germany – even inside metropolitan areas inhabited by millions.

vidarh 4y ago

I'm without internet connection multiple times a week on average because mobile networks are far from flawless (I live in that very rural place where you'd expect to not have regular connectivity called London). I don't necessarily care so much about "true" local first as 1) something where at least some care has been taken to ensure it can keep working while offline, 2) with respect to privacy, I halfway agree with you, but bigger than privacy to me is portability, for example if it turns out I can't trust the current provider. But defaulting to not shipping my data to a server somewhere is a good way of increasing trust. That said, I want encryption too.

locustous 4y ago

> building a truly local-first anything is significantly more complicated than the alternative of "always online" for most domains It is more complicated. It works best when the user has a distinct data bucket that is exclusively theirs. A note taking app. Personal finance. But they may have multiple devices so syncing is desirable. This use case is reasonably common and turns out to be relatively simple to do. If you have shared data between users. If you have a significant amount of data that just requires being online to interact with the system. Then it has pretty minimal benefits over just centralizing the data and it should be avoided to minimize complexity.

Falkon1313 4y ago
>But they may have multiple devices so syncing is desirable. USB cables or thumbdrives make that a snap, and you don't have to rely on some flaky third-party system or a network connection. It's all 100% under your control 100% of the time. Really, social interactive shared things are the only things where it ever makes sense to be online-first. For everything else, native is way better in every possible way. Speed, security, ability to still access it in the future, etc. It's good to have online backups in case your house burns down. But that's still second-tier to having local backups.
- gbalduzzi 4y ago
  I would hate and never use an utility app that requires me to constantly physically connect my devices in order to keep data in sync.

crispinb 4y ago

With waves of climate change disasters sweeping at an increasing rate across the world, and resulting wars being almost inevitable in the next few decades, you are unlikely to have always-on internet for the entirety of your life. My region (first world, in a wealthy nation) has had its infrastructure (roads and comms alike) largely destroyed twice in the last year or so. As we're rich, it gets built back, but that takes time. I've been stung enough from weeks'-long outages and periods of isolation to never again completely rely on an internet connection. I do use software that requires a connection, but not for anything critical.

LAC-Tech 4y ago

Been involved in projects like software adoption in remote aid posts in Papua New Guinea that don't even have roads, and Agtech apps in deep rural Australia. Even with Starlink there will still be places that stuff needs to work offline.

nicbou 4y ago

If you travel, you'll constantly experience no or degraded internet access. Airports, trains, hotel Wi-Fi, rural areas, etc. It heavily influenced how I work and which tools I use.

Falkon1313 4y ago

>building a truly local-first anything is significantly more complicated than the alternative of "always online" Wow. That is so incredibly wrong. People have been building local-first software twice as long as the internet has even been publicly accessible at all. The tools to build local native apps, the UI for them, and the libraries that they can use, are all still decades ahead of the web-first tools. I say this as someone who has spent the last 15 years building web apps. We haven't even reached parity with 1995-era desktop apps yet. We're only barely beginning to approach that level of usability and functionality now. And with radically more complexity to do so. (And worse performance.) Building native desktop software without having any dependence on being online all the time and dependence on having high bandwidth and dependence on a good signal is worlds simpler than developing software that depends on all that extra stuff. All that stuff that is out of your control.

pharmakom 4y ago
It is more complicated. If you can accept an always online / always connected model then you can guarantee more things because there is only one source of truth (the server). The reason to care about local first is that even today, it’s hard to guarantee a server will always be connected and that model has some privacy and scalability challenges.

ssss11 4y ago

Many people are not online all the time. Many people don’t want to share all of their data and would like to keep some local.