Local First, Forever

1

Grumpy Website

#Sports #Window Manager #Mac Tools 7 social mentions

2

RemoteStorage

Https://remotestorage.io/ was a protocol intended for this. IIRC the visison was that all applications could implement this and you could provide that application with your remotestorage URL, which you could self host. I looked into this some time ago as I was fed up with WebDAV being the only viable open protocol for file shares/synchronization (especially after hosting my own NextCloud instance, which OOMed because the XML blobs for a large folder it wanted to create as a response used too much memory) and found it through this gist [0] which was a statement about Flock [1] shutting down. It looks like a cool and not that complex protocol, but all the implementations seem to be unmaintained. And the official javascript client [2] seems to be ironically be used mostly to access Google Drive or DropBox Remotestorage also has an internet draft https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-dejong-remotestorage/ which is relatively easy to understand and not very long. [0] https://gist.github.com/rhodey/873ae9d527d8d2a38213 [1] https://github.com/signalapp/Flock.

#Developer Tools #App Development #Realtime Backend / API 20 social mentions

3

PouchDB

Pouch DB is a great local first DB with optional sync for JavaScript: https://pouchdb.com/.

#NoSQL Databases #Databases #Developer Tools 24 social mentions

4

Pijul

Using theory of patches would better compliment the current approach. Integrating a scm such as https://pijul.org or atleast the underlying tech would allow for better conflict resolutions. Transferring patches should also allow for more efficient use of io.

#Git #Code Collaboration #Git Tools 44 social mentions

5

Thymer

I think an important requirement for making the "forever" aspect of local-first possible is to make the backend sync server available for local self-hosting. For example, we're building a local-first multiplayer "IDE for tasks and notes" [1] where simply syncing flat files won't work well for certain features we want to offer like real-time collaboration, permission controls and so on. In our case we'll simply allow users to "eject" at any time by saving their "workspace.zip" (which contains all state serialized into flat files) and downloading a "server.exe/.bin" and switch to self-hosting the backend if they want (or vice versa). [1] https://thymer.com/.

#Note Taking #Task Management #Databases 15 social mentions

6

ProjectionLab

I've been a happy user of a PWA doing local sync. That said, the data it needs to sync can fit in localStorage. Not affiliated in anyway, but the app is http://projectionlab.com/ and it allows you to choose between json import/export, localStorage sync, and server-based sync as desired. Since it has an easy to use import/export, sync with some other cloud provider on iOS is basically just a matter of "saving the file," since iOS lets you do background sync of authorized Files providers. Even though it's a web app, being able to download the page and then after run it entirely offline in a fresh browser window each time, built a lot of trust with me, to the point where I mostly run it with localStorage enabled and only occasionally check its online/offline behavior anymore.

#Personal Finance #Financial Planning #Retirement 44 social mentions