Any insights/research on what kind of users care / don't care about local first software?
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Anyone using their laptops or phones on public or private transport, or when you have sporadic or unreliable internet.
Construction industry is a good one: often you are working in a remote area or have cut power (so no WiFi) and having access to your data is key. That’s why there is so much printing still going on- paper works offline.
security is a big reason to go local first in general (not necessarily with crdts but they are a strong option), less data over the wire to central servers, you can avoid even needing to know about user data if it stays on their device(s)
collaboration software benefits a lot from this approach because people can just use it and know it won’t get out of sync
Also, anything where you might need data offline at a specific moment. Like if the internet goes down but you still need the thing to show to the guy at the place, you’ll be glad if they used crdts because you’ll automatically have a copy
Also, cheapskates who don’t want to pay cloud bills
> and know it won’t get out of sync
but will you ever be able to trust the automatic merge?
Imagine a complex document with a few collaborators which work in parallel offline and make significant changes (that is the use case of automerge?).
You will have to proofread the entire document after every non trivial automatic merge, or how good does this work in practice? Would it be easier to just wait for a wifi connection and do the changes in real time?
now you can compare it to pull requests in software development, but in software development we have compilers, linters and tests which point out merge bugs.
> Also, cheapskates who don’t want to pay cloud bills
You will have to store it in the cloud eventually, otherwise it is just local software, not local-first
Not quite true, you can utilize peer to peer (p2p) storage options, where only the individuals that are allowed to edit and view the document/media/file do storage. Really you only need one peer that has an IP address to do NAT traversals, that peer need not do any storage, but just passes transactions along to the end users.
With IPV6 and Torr onion routing NAT traversals is almost becoming a non issue.
People who are experiencing a natural or political disaster which partitions the internet.