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Local First
An outstanding essay is on local first and how to resolve the best of Markdown with a local plain text file with a method called CRDT. As the article mentions, Towards a better future. As other technologies like Google Docs, Notion, etc. always lack something, CRDTs seem to solve all 7 points and satisfy the local-first ideas.
| 1. Fast | 2. Multi-device | 3. Offline | 4. Collaboration | 5. Longevity | 6. Privacy | 7. User control | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Files + email attachments | ✓ | — | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ | — | ✓ |
| Google Docs | — | ✓ | — | ✓ | — | ✗ | — |
| Trello | — | ✓ | — | ✓ | — | ✗ | ✗ |
| ✗ | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | |
| Dropbox | ✓ | — | — | ✗ | ✓ | — | ✓ |
| Git+GitHub | ✓ | — | ✓ | — | ✓ | — | ✓ |
| Web apps | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Thick client | ✓ | — | ✓ | ✗ | — | ✗ | ✗ |
| Firebase, CloudKit, Realm | — | ✓ | ✓ | — | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| CouchDB | — | — | ✓ | ✗ | — | — | — |
| CRDTs | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
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Source of above table from above essay
We have found some technologies that appear to be promising foundations for local-first ideals. Most notable are the family of distributed systems algorithms called Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs).
It seems that CRDTs are a solution to collaborative local first. Especially interesting with Markdown and Plaintext Files.
Ink & Switch has developed an open-source, JavaScript CRDT implementation called Automerge. It is based on our earlier research on JSON CRDTs. We have then combined Auto merge with the Dat networking stack to form Hypermerge. We do not claim that these libraries fully realize local-first ideals — more work is still required.
However, based on our experience with them, we believe that CRDTs have the potential to be a foundation for a new generation of software. Just as packet switching was an enabling technology for the Internet and the web, or as capacitive touchscreens were an enabling technology for smartphones, so we think CRDTs may be the foundation for collaborative software that gives users full ownership of their data.
In these experiments we tried network communication via WebRTC; a “sneakernet” implementation of copying files around with Dropbox and USB keys; possible use of the IPFS protocols; and eventually settled on the Hypercore peer-to-peer libraries from Dat
# Further Reading
Origin: Plaintext Files,
Local-first software: You own your data, in spite of the cloud
References:
Created 2025-01-17