At one point the younger generation does not even remember there was a local-first software.
Sadly the relentless efforts of the corporations are paying off.
That doesn't mean people are okay with it. It means their choice is made for them.
There's nothing they can do, they have no realistic expertise or control, and they vote with what - dollars once every phone purchase?
More and more, I am seeing many companies that realize they can do both: take the user's money and feed them ads. After all, that's more profitable than just taking their money.
As examples, T-mo, Verizon, my local gas station, various airlines all both take my money and give me ads. Some are even known to sell my data.
So, can I actually vote with my wallet?
And even under the model where printing money causes inflation, we're in a negative interest rate regime meaning printing money would cause /deflation/.
Probably we will see the same play out here.
If you mix the two crowds: the people that actually care with the people that will just want faster apps, you get a powerful bootstrap traction.
Lets also not forget that things might just vanish and when we are able to collect them and make personal relations that make sense to us, we will want to be secure that things that matter to us wont go away because we are keeping them. Its pure psychology.
The parent poster is forgetting that before we get use of how things are right now in the digital realm, we had to deal with the material world and thats how we shaped our minds. And in that world we learn how important is to keep things nearby and have mnemonics to help our minds that needs to keep so much information that our devices become our second brains.
I'm working on a fancy chromium inspired prototype to tackle this exact issue and just with what i got here working in "prototype mode" i kind of don't want anything else.. it's just.. another level.
Its technologically superior and even ordinary, unaware people will just want this. Cloud have its place of course, but "local-first" will eat a lot of their lunch in the coming years.
Do we really though? Most people just buy a new phone, idly agree to all cloud sync stuff that the Android vendor has slapped on it and only notice "hey, I have 500GB free storage for the next 6 months!" and that's the end of it.
There is a market for local-first. Absolutely. But I question how big it is.
Maybe in corporate? If not there, I don't think you can make it big in that area. We at HN are a fairly negligible rounding error compared to most of the internet-connected humanity.
Local-first is a technological sophistication from the current tech status-quo, so it requires more labor to get at a point where it can stand against the current cloud-first applications.
We will only be able to see how far it can go, once the next-gen applications reach the same level.
It will be a harsh competition, but if we can just ship the platform along with it, and at least Android make it possible, users wont even notice, because it was the dev's that made that decision for them. And the dev's will do it because it might make their apps a little better, more responsive and fail proof.
Of course this all must happen before 5G or part of the leverage is gone unfortunately..
But we need at least try anyway, because a world where all the information is centralized on the FAANG titans is a world where freedom, civil and human rights are constantly endangered(especially in the age of AI automation).
And yes, the world is heading into a dystopia. All of us that care better prepare some big ZFS clusters for redundant data and well-connected ISPs so we can still exchange data in an encrypted and decentralized manner.
But I feel that it's a lost battle. We missed the train. There's still time but it is shrinking every year.
Increasingly, millennials also are having children, and I think there is a market opportunity for these sorts of products (e.g. I want to sort pictures by my kids, but without giving facial recognition to fb/google).