Comment by oscargrouch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by oscargrouch | Hacker News Reader

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Not just that, but there also a lot of cases that the local-first software will perform much better given the resources might be cached.

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.

> 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.

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.

I agree with you. But that's because the state-of-the-art in clients are cloud hungry applications, giving their parent companies have much to profit from this behavior.

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).

Oh, I completely agree, especially with the point that most end users wouldn't notice the under-the-hood changes (except maybe for apps working better when connectivity is scarce or missing).

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.

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