Comment by aeharding | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aeharding | Hacker News Reader

Great to see it going open source! I hope Actual can keep development going with the community support.

Similarly, a local-first (PouchDB) budgeting app I built[1] went open source[2][3] a few years ago. It's worked out well, I love seeing what everyone does with it in their forks. Unlike Actual however, I maintain a paid subscription service while being open source.

It's worked out quite well. Luckily it's not a huge time commitment as a side project, probably due to no native apps. I've also shifted from active development to maintenance, with sporadic updates every now and then. For example, I recently moved everything from Gitlab to Github[4] and upgraded a bunch of dependencies under the hood to get everything compiling on Apple Silicon. (For example, I now run AngularJS tests with Jest, hehe.)

[1] https://financier.io/

[2] https://github.com/financier-io/

[3] https://blog.financier.io/financier-is-now-open-source-bdfe9...

[4] https://blog.financier.io/weve-moved-to-github-4617239b9fa3

> Great to see it going open source

It's actually shutting down.

What's shutting down is the public syncing server. That server is literally just a message store: it takes CRDT changes and puts them in a big table. And it servers them back out.

Now that the server is public, it's incredibly easy for you to run your own. It's such a simple server (no postgres etc requirement) that this model is actually way better.

CRDT's and the like seem like the perfect thing to build an app, but you make a good point about it requiring something so custom compared to a thin client that makes web service requests for data on each screen / page view.

> you make a good point about it requiring something so custom

The comment you're replying to didn't say this at all, the developer did. In theory it's also wrong. The server can be application agnostic. It shouldn't care whether the CRDT update is from a budget app or an RSS reader or whatever else, because the sync job for the server is exactly the same. You should also be able to encrypt the content, and therefore set up generic shared CRDT servers instead of requiring people to run their own.

It only requires more work now because nobody has built that yet.

The comment I am replying to was from the developer who wrote Actual: https://github.com/actualbudget/actual/commits?author=jlongs...

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