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I have always liked the idea of local first. The problem with it though, is that it almost always suck or isn't that important or both. At least for myself, I

I have always liked the idea of local first. The problem with it though, is that it almost always suck or isn't that important or both. At least for myself, I barely use any local first software. The software that I do use that is local in any important sense of the word is basically local-only software. I realize this every time I lose connection on my phone. It becomes pretty much a pretty bad camera compared to my Sony. I live in a country were I have good 3G speed pretty much everywhere so internet connectivity is never an issue, not even on moving things like trains or boats. The very few times I have been flying or whatever I simply don't do any work because it's usually uncomfortable anyway. This is the main reason I don't really care about local first and have been diving into Phoenix Liveview the last couple of weeks. The productivity boost I get and cool realtime apps it empowers me to build is more important to me than the dream of making local first web apps. A realtime demo of things updating with multiplayer functionality is a far easier sell than "look, the app works even when I turn on flight mode". And honestly, in like 99% of the time, it is also more useful. I have done local first web apps before and it is always such a pain because syncing is a near impossible problem to solve. What happens if you and someone else have done changes to the same things like 2 hours or more ago? Who even remembers which value is correct? How do you display the diffs? No matter what you do, you probably need to implement some kind of diffing functionality, you need to implement revisions because the other guy will complain that the changes were overwritten and so on. There is just so many issues that is very hard to solve and require so much work to be done that it isn't worth it unless you are a large team with a lot of resources. You end up with a complicated mess of code that is like git but worse in every way. It's easier to simply say the app doesn't work offline because we rarely are offline and no one will pay for the effort required. Unfortunately.

abc123abc123 2y ago
Fascinating how far technology use and philosophy has diverged between generations. I'm old school and local first. I don't own a smart phone and I host my own music, video and I read real books and ebooks I download and read from an off line eReader. Then I compare with the modern man who streams his music, video, buys audio books as a service, uses only web browser applications, and then bitterly complains when the internet goes down, or when the prices of his apps go up, or when his favourite music or movie disappears from the service provider and so on and so on. So not only a complete loss of control and computing autonomy, but also a financial drain as well when counting the cost of all the apps and services. Mean while, I'll happily chug along, local first, and if the internet doesn't work, at most my web browsing and email suffers, but since I do have my reference libraries, documentation and interpreters available locally, I can still get work done until the internet comes back up.
- staticelf 2y ago
  Yeah I kind of agree with what you're saying, the main issue for me is that I work in web dev and very few people are like you are and would pay for local first software. I have a hard time even convincing people I know hate cloud spyware shit to use local first alternatives that require just a little more setup. I would love to make all my work local first but when the users are requesting other things I have to oblige. The feature list is long and the time is short. I simply can't spend a lot of time on making a sucky git alternative for when conflicts happen. When doing work on my spare time projects I want to make as much as possible in the little time that I do have, so local first is pretty much on the bottom of the list. Personally, I tried to build a music library but it's very hard today since you can't get music legally in a good cheap way. Illegally by torrenting is also hard because no one torrents music anymore. I do keep a library of movies but I rarely visit it and stream new movies with torrent software. Basically everything else, like work, is mostly online based today so there is not really much to do locally anymore except photo editing and watching movies for me. Of course, I do still develop on my machine but as soon as I get stuck on something I need the internet to look up some reference or whatever and if I don't have the internet I can't get emails or chat messages from colleagues or push my code anyway so then I can only work for a short while. I completely hate most cloud software and prefer local first but my issue is that no one except nerds on hackernews really cares about it and it is too much work for little gain. I actually are in a process to rewrite a side project that I hope to one day be a business from a local-first react project to a phoenix liveview. Why? Because I think the realtime aspects of the project will bring in more customers and it's far easier to maintain the state. So again, less work and more features I will actually get paid for. If I ever make it to a stable business, I will probably make a small portion of the app work offline because I know some customers will like it when they use it under ground.
- braden-lk 2y ago
  Convenience is king. As life piles up (errands, parenting, everything), cognitive capacity goes down and the more the user wants a "push button do everything" solution. They'll trade autonomy for ultra-convenience + a dropped internet connection now and then. I'm somewhere in the middle, but I see why people do either.
madacol 2y ago
I think you are missing the point. You can implement local-first with the merging strategy of last-write-wins, which is equivalent as any cloud app where the server is the source of truth. But now you automatically get all the other benefits of local-first: - you can use it offline and expect changes to merge when coming back online. With the caveat that changes may be lost, but it's at least possible to have pending changes, you don't even have that option on cloud apps - easier to develop, no more developing custom API backends - multi-player

abc123abc123 2y ago

Fascinating how far technology use and philosophy has diverged between generations. I'm old school and local first. I don't own a smart phone and I host my own music, video and I read real books and ebooks I download and read from an off line eReader. Then I compare with the modern man who streams his music, video, buys audio books as a service, uses only web browser applications, and then bitterly complains when the internet goes down, or when the prices of his apps go up, or when his favourite music or movie disappears from the service provider and so on and so on. So not only a complete loss of control and computing autonomy, but also a financial drain as well when counting the cost of all the apps and services. Mean while, I'll happily chug along, local first, and if the internet doesn't work, at most my web browsing and email suffers, but since I do have my reference libraries, documentation and interpreters available locally, I can still get work done until the internet comes back up.

staticelf 2y ago
Yeah I kind of agree with what you're saying, the main issue for me is that I work in web dev and very few people are like you are and would pay for local first software. I have a hard time even convincing people I know hate cloud spyware shit to use local first alternatives that require just a little more setup. I would love to make all my work local first but when the users are requesting other things I have to oblige. The feature list is long and the time is short. I simply can't spend a lot of time on making a sucky git alternative for when conflicts happen. When doing work on my spare time projects I want to make as much as possible in the little time that I do have, so local first is pretty much on the bottom of the list. Personally, I tried to build a music library but it's very hard today since you can't get music legally in a good cheap way. Illegally by torrenting is also hard because no one torrents music anymore. I do keep a library of movies but I rarely visit it and stream new movies with torrent software. Basically everything else, like work, is mostly online based today so there is not really much to do locally anymore except photo editing and watching movies for me. Of course, I do still develop on my machine but as soon as I get stuck on something I need the internet to look up some reference or whatever and if I don't have the internet I can't get emails or chat messages from colleagues or push my code anyway so then I can only work for a short while. I completely hate most cloud software and prefer local first but my issue is that no one except nerds on hackernews really cares about it and it is too much work for little gain. I actually are in a process to rewrite a side project that I hope to one day be a business from a local-first react project to a phoenix liveview. Why? Because I think the realtime aspects of the project will bring in more customers and it's far easier to maintain the state. So again, less work and more features I will actually get paid for. If I ever make it to a stable business, I will probably make a small portion of the app work offline because I know some customers will like it when they use it under ground.
braden-lk 2y ago
Convenience is king. As life piles up (errands, parenting, everything), cognitive capacity goes down and the more the user wants a "push button do everything" solution. They'll trade autonomy for ultra-convenience + a dropped internet connection now and then. I'm somewhere in the middle, but I see why people do either.

madacol 2y ago

I think you are missing the point. You can implement local-first with the merging strategy of last-write-wins, which is equivalent as any cloud app where the server is the source of truth. But now you automatically get all the other benefits of local-first: - you can use it offline and expect changes to merge when coming back online. With the caveat that changes may be lost, but it's at least possible to have pending changes, you don't even have that option on cloud apps - easier to develop, no more developing custom API backends - multi-player