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Comment by wim | Hacker News Reader

I think an important requirement for making the "forever" aspect of local-first possible is to make the backend sync server available for local self-hosting.

For example, we're building a local-first multiplayer "IDE for tasks and notes" [1] where simply syncing flat files won't work well for certain features we want to offer like real-time collaboration, permission controls and so on.

In our case we'll simply allow users to "eject" at any time by saving their "workspace.zip" (which contains all state serialized into flat files) and downloading a "server.exe/.bin" and switch to self-hosting the backend if they want (or vice versa).

[1] https://thymer.com/

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I saw the link in your unminified html to [0], and wanted to boost it here in case others had also not seen it before.

> We're doing it all completely bootstrapped. Day 1 starts with no social media presence, no followers, no press contacts, no road map, a shoestring budget and no revenue. We want to do it the hard way to demonstrate that the barriers to entry are lower than they've ever been. All you need is a couch and a laptop (couch optional).

Bootstrapping is not very much in vogue in these orange parts, but it's very much my jam.

[0] https://80daystartup.com/

If there's an app-specific backend sync server it's not going to be "forever."

Why can't syncing data be commodified via a dumb cloud that just syncs blobs? If you want privacy locally encrypt everything.

We already have that in the form of S3 and friends, but they aren't consumer-accessible. We also have some platform-specific ones like Apple iCloud but those are platform-specific.

In the end the problem is that there's no financial motive to do this.

Sure it is. You don't see people complaining that a 20- or 25-year-old game no longer has its original servers running if you can easily host one at home or use a community-run one. Take Quake for example.

Considering people are still running BBS Doors and other software from very long ago, I'm not sure that I completely agree.

It would be pretty slick if the export also included a versioned text spec defining the schema for the data..

So even if the software and all supporting software is no longer available you can still make something to read the data..

This is kind of getting into r/Preppers territory, but still... There's something nice about that.

The previous post's point is that they make their app's sync service as available to users as the app itself. "Forever" is the wrong word for any of this, but the sync service will live as long as the app does.

(BTW, your idea supposes the ongoing existence of storage services with a common, stable API an app can be written against. You can barely say that exists now, much less expect it to into the indefinite future. The previous poster only assumes general servers are available, including BYO if you want.)

I am working on exactly this in a music player I am writing. Specifically, you can use any S3 compatible storage to sync your music and metadata between devices, and it's end-to-end encrypted.

I plan to offer single click resale of storage directly in the app for users who don't want to deal with access keys, secret keys, ACLs, and the like.

Looks interesting, I currently use Obsidian for personal planning in a similar way and am happy with it, and Asana for the team. How would you pitch the product compared to Obsidian?

Yo, that's sick! More things should do exactly this!

If it doesnt have a debugger then its not an IDE.

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