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- turn on lights — there are smart light bulbs that phone home to the cloud. Along with smart assistance, home automation, etc. those are exactly the things tha
by hosh 2y ago
- turn on lights — there are smart light bulbs that phone home to the cloud. Along with smart assistance, home automation, etc. those are exactly the things that should be local-first, or at least, the server software should be onsite (such as Home Assistant — edge computing). We already have examples of what happens when companies shut down the servers those automations depend upon. To go even fuether, each device that is truly local-first enables the kind of cooperative automation conceived of in Promise Theory.
- checking the weather — although predictions are easier to come by from NOAA’s weather models, areas can have microclimates both natural and man-made that are not so easily predicted through atmospheric modelling. Permaculture design includes scaling microclimates in very small areas (on the order of specific plants) to tweak what can grow there. Local-first makes sense if you want to instrument those microclimates. Better yet, there are ways to read the clouds and conditions to get decent predictions for weather conditions for your immediate area.
- local-first multiplayer video game - what an intriguing idea! The closest I can think of is that multi-user virtual reality spaces that was built on a modern version of Smalltalk. It isn’t local first, but it supports multiple, independent servers that mesh together. There are probably also ways to do this with turn based games, such as chess or go.
Do you have any other examples? The ones you brought up were a good exercise to see how far one can take local-first design.