[HN Gopher] Local-first software: You own your data, in spite of...
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       Local-first software: You own your data, in spite of the cloud
       (2019)
        
       Author : Jtsummers
       Score  : 53 points
       Date   : 2023-10-02 19:49 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.inkandswitch.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.inkandswitch.com)
        
       | xnx wrote:
       | Is there any equivalent for apps where the code is open source
       | and the data is totally under your control but in the cloud? I'd
       | love something that's as easy to install as an Android app, but
       | ran on a server someone else maintains. This is certainly
       | possible now with enough effort, but there doesn't seem to be
       | anything nearly as standard and easy as PHP on a shared host used
       | to be.
        
       | Jtsummers wrote:
       | Only three past submissions with discussions (though quite a few
       | comments) the most recent discussion about two years ago:
       | 
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26266881 - Feb 25, 2021 (90
       | comments)
       | 
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21581444 - Nov 20, 2019 (241
       | comments)
       | 
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19804478 - May 3, 2019 (191
       | comments)
        
         | dang wrote:
         | Thanks! Macroexpanded:
         | 
         |  _The cloud is a prison. can the local-first software movement
         | set us free?_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36984692 -
         | Aug 2023 (206 comments)
         | 
         |  _Local-First Software (2019)_ -
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31594613 - June 2022 (29
         | comments)
         | 
         |  _Local-First Software:You Own Your Data, in Spite of the Cloud
         | (2019) [pdf]_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26266881 -
         | Feb 2021 (90 comments)
         | 
         |  _What if we had Local-First Software?_ -
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24790170 - Oct 2020 (144
         | comments)
         | 
         |  _Local-first software (2019)_ -
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24027663 - Aug 2020 (131
         | comments)
         | 
         |  _Local-First Software (2019)_ -
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23985816 - July 2020 (9
         | comments)
         | 
         |  _Local-first software: You own your data, in spite of the
         | cloud_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23966558 - July
         | 2020 (1 comment)
         | 
         |  _Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the
         | cloud_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21581444 - Nov
         | 2019 (239 comments)
         | 
         |  _Local-first software: You own your data, in spite of the
         | cloud_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19804478 - May
         | 2019 (190 comments)
        
       | r3trohack3r wrote:
       | Love this and it aligns well with the work I'm currently doing.
       | 
       | I believe local-first peer-to-peer networks have gotten close-
       | enough to being able to deliver feature parity with centralized
       | Application Service Providers for 5+ years now, the industry just
       | hasn't caught up.
       | 
       | For social media platforms like Facebook and X, their "killer
       | app" features are all solvable with hash-based data structures
       | (chains, trees, forests), p2p capability systems, and gossip
       | protocols. Identity systems are solvable in ways that non-
       | technical people can understand.
       | 
       | Part of the solution was the p2p stack maturing. The other part
       | is that centralized solutions have normalized a lot of user flows
       | that p2p can be competitive with, users have been trained up on a
       | lot of patterns that previously wouldn't have been palatable in
       | the market.
       | 
       | There is extreme market demand for it, and the zeitgeist is tuned
       | into the societal and financial failings of ASPs right now.
       | 
       | Facebook is trying to act as the free relay and archivist for the
       | entire world's social graph, there are a lot of hard problems to
       | solve there which personally, I think contributed to social
       | networking silently dying and degenerating into the monstrosity
       | that Social Media is.
       | 
       | Once this stuff starts making it into end-user products, I
       | suspect it's going to be a one way door. P2P can provide user
       | experiences that centralized services can't match - either for
       | technical, financial, or legal reasons.
       | 
       | We are in a sweet spot of opportunity for building the web as it
       | was promised to us.
       | 
       | If folks working in this space want to compare notes, or are
       | looking for work on a well funded no-BS R&D team developing this
       | space, my email is in my bio.
        
       | satvikpendem wrote:
       | As someone who very closely watches this CRDT and local-first
       | space, it's really quite a bit harder than doing it the old
       | fashioned client-server-model way, because you have to architect
       | your systems to sync seamlessly when offline and then online.
       | I've used tRPC and GraphQL before and I've really been thinking
       | of something where we'd have the same DX as the client-server
       | model such as with tRPC and GraphQL but in a way where there is
       | no difference between client and server state, there is only
       | "state." This makes sense because for local-first, the entire
       | state of the app must be replicated locally anyway.
       | 
       | Recently there have been CRDT solutions that try to solve this
       | problem, however, such as Triplit [0], or ElectricSQL [1].
       | 
       | [0] https://triplit.dev
       | 
       | [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37584049
        
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