Interviews with Leaders in Local-First

Interviews with Leaders in Local-First(localfirst.fm)

3 points by tantaman 2 years ago | 2 comments

From inkandswitch.com on their first podcast episode

> All in all, we speculate that web apps will never be able to provide all the local-first properties we are looking for, due to the fundamental thin-client nature of the platform. By choosing to build a web app, you are choosing the path of data belonging to you and your company, not to your users.

This is just wrong, consider cups with a headless backend at 127.0.0.1, but in there doing whatever it needs to do.

Browsers are too good at being universal frontends to ban them according to shaky dogma.

jauntywundrkind 2 years ago | |

There's Isolated Web Apps, an extension of PWAs where you download an app then it has no way to dial home. Effectively the app is it's own origin. https://chromestatus.com/feature/5146307550248960

You still don't know what an app will send home. It doesn't block network access. But with eval banned in web app stores, it means you at least know what code you are running.

You're not wrong about cups & web as a platform's utility. And damn it's amazing, fully onboard. But the local-first folks I think are onto a major thread, hit the nail on the head that connected computing is taking back the glimmer of power and control users briefly saw in the short-lived Personal Computing era. Yeah, technically you can use the web locally to manage things within reach, but when someone launches a web app, that's almost never the case. In almost every case the webapp is strictly dependent on services of the site.

And that's what local-first wants to change!