LocalFirst: You Keep Using That Word
2 points by adityaathalye
2 points by adityaathalye
I really liked this article, especially the bit on "multiplayer" being optional. The one thing I had an immediate negative reaction to was:
A VisiCalc spreadsheet on an Apple IIe is not a local-first document.
And at least for how I would think about it, the only thing stopping a VisiCalc spreadsheet on an Apple IIe from being a local-first-document is a program on your neighbor's Apple IIe to merge changes to their copy from the copy of yours you brought them on a floppy. That is, you need to be able to sync and merge, but syncing and merging can ideally be done from dumb storage rather than deeply embedded in your application.
Author here. The challenge with merging in dumb storage is the usual “you’ll need a CRDT with that.” VisiCalc was the chosen example precisely because I’m reasonably certain it would make a mess of collisions. ;)
That said, a VisiCalc alternative that’s purely immutable operations materialized into a spreadsheet view would solve this problem. That just doesn’t exist yet, that I’m aware of. But one day!
Perhaps a better way of framing "there is no server" is "there's nothing special about the software the server is running that excludes you from running it yourself"?