There is a lot of reason to be excited about local-first and how it could enable much lower costs to build useful apps (both in terms of money and skills). AI will certainly spur that on.

But I think local-first will be of the biggest benefit to small teams of professional developers who can see local opportunities bigger corporations are missing. At least in the short term.

There are barefoot developers too, but it's not as simple as professional vs barefoot — there's a spectrum of app developers, each with their own economic rationale.

Anytype is such a tool, local-first and synced via IPFS. It just works. And it's so flexible! And it recently got support for shared spaces, which works really well.

Looks interesting! What are you using for peer-to-peer data sync?

tiptap

I'm not sure exactly what you're seeing but I do see a trend of Postgres products focussed on the frontend app developer e.g. Supabase, Neon.

Those developers are used to dealing with objects and types and SQL is a step further removed from what they're comfortable with.

Agreed. Even better if it was a local-first web application.

Congrats! As a sheets user I appreciate that rows are seamlessly added as you scroll past the initial sheet size.

As much as I love clicking "Add 1000 more rows", we thought continuous scroll might be appreciated :)

To what extent is data ownership/user control still a goal of local-first? It feels like that part of the rationale has tapered off.

One use case where SQLite is a good option is for embedding as a local database in an app. Starting local-only with SQLite allows you to defer a lot of the backend effort while testing an MVP.

You might find https://github.com/electric-sql/electric pretty cool.

Clarification: I'm not the author of the linked post.

I read your post some time back and feel it's been an organizing force for developers in this space — great job and thanks for the work you put into it.

I often wonder about terminology. What was the reason you chose "local-first" over "offline-first" (or even "serverfree" as in this case)?

For me (not the author) "local first" makes it clear that "on device" is a first-class citizen, and the server is an afterthought. "Offline-first" or "server free" sounds much more limiting, like it will be able to limp when offline, but really wants to connect to a server eventually.

I also (personally) don't like "serverfree" because servers are good - they're not the problem! It's the "servers you don't and can't control" cloud dependencies that are the issue.

Sadly, I'm not part of Ink and Switch and did not write that post...

They are an incredible bunch, as are so many people in the local-first / CRDT space, many I have had the opportunity to meet and collaborate with.

My mistake, I see that post wasn't written by you