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Comment by godshatter | Hacker News Reader

It's crazy that we live in a time when "pay with money and your data" or "pay with your eyeballs" are the only viable options and "pay with your money without your data" can't even be considered.

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The problem with local apps is actually a problem with closed-source software. I refuse to rely on closed-source software to access my data because then I am beholden to the vendor of that software to access my data. It’s only slightly better than putting my data in the cloud. What I really want is the source code to that local app so I can guarantee the ability to continue accessing my data forever. This can be done with open source software but very few companies want to sell their product as open source. Some version of source-available may help but you still have the problem of the company discontinuing support so you need some escape hatch on the license in that case and as far as I know nobody has tried.

wouldn't it be enough for the underlying user data to be stored in a well-documented and widely supported format? I don't care if Obsidian, Logseq or similar are open or closed source if my data is just a folder of markdown and jpeg/pngs.

In simple cases maybe but in general how the format is actually interpreted matters more than what some spec says. Markdown is a great example because in practice almost every markdown renderer does things a bit differently.

Would you feel the same way about a closed source local-first app that used sqlite as the underlying database?

That would let you access your data forever, albeit you might still need to write your own scripts to port it to another app.

In theory, open formats would be enough. In practice you still end up depending on peculiarities of the software handling those formats more often than not so I agree that having access to the source code and permission to modify it when the original vendor's interests no longer align with yours is the only solution.

That's because we allow corporations to into misleading that products are free even though you are still paying for them by letting yourself be manipulated into giving third parties your money who then give some of it back to the original service provider. This really needs to be considered a kind of fraud unless the full cost is displayed upfront, not unlike when a vendor charges your card more than the agreed price.

Someone has to prove that there’s a demand for paid local first subscriptions. Open source and tailscale can’t shoulder it all if you want more adoption.

Or split into 2 things:

Most people have a Dropbox, Apple Storage, Google Storage or similar.

A lot of people used to happily pay for desktop software.

It is sort of a combo of those 2 things economically.

Dropbox could sweep up here by being the provider of choice for offline apps. Defining the open protocol and supporting it. adding notifications and some compute.

You then use Dropbox free for 1, 5, 10 offline apps (some may need free some paid) and soon you'll need to upgrade Storage like any iPhone user!

>A lot of people used to happily pay for desktop software.

More or less no one used to "happily" pay. Absent pirating software, they did pay often hundreds of dollars for all sort of software sight unseen (though shareware did provide try before you bought) which often came with minimal updates/upgrades unless they paid for such.

But expectations have largely changed.

Happy as you can be when paying for something!

Given the anemic sales of macOS apps vs online subscriptions, I would disagree. I’m sure it’s the same story on windows. Offline only makes sense when your public infrastructure is garbage. Otherwise most people will choose convenience over control.

Adobe and Microsoft might disagree…

MS favors Office 365 online.

Adobe is keen to emphasize that their products are cloud based

Making people dependent on a cloud subscription isn't exactly in the spirit of spreading offline programs...

Dependent isn't the intent here. Obviously big corps are incentivised to do that so there is that danger. But ideally it is all based on open standards.

iCloud kind of does this and is the suggested way to store app data files.

It’s not immune to file conflicts across your devices though.

We're living in the world of Dubai chocolate and labubu so this tells you everything you need to know about consumer behavior.

Fads and trends have always existed. Literally as long as we've had culture.

What point are you trying to make?

But before it wasn't as easy to create them every few days.

If I had to guess, I would say the GP wants to express that the mass of consumers acts in uninformed silly ways, and with such people local-first has a very low adoption rate, because they usually don't spend a thought about their digital foot/fingerprint or who really owns their data or how they do their personal computing and whether they are independent of anyone else in their personal computing. That there is this huge part of our society, that again and again creates incentives for enshittification.

Is it really a huge part of our society or is it just one that megacorporations amplify as loud as they can because that's how they want people to behave.

That's a good question actually. I don't know for sure. I tend to think, that for many people things like the Internet are mysteriously working and they have no idea how it works, and as a consequence rarely they go further putting up requirements of how it should work for them. They just accept how things online are, status quo of that which is most visible. Ergo complete victims of the network effects in their social bubbles.

Labubu obsession is a surefire sign of economic depression: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1O6bN2zWSM

The really crazy thing is that everyone just forgot a couple of years ago "Dubai chocolate" meant something a lot more gross.

> The really crazy thing is that everyone just forgot a couple of years ago "Dubai chocolate" meant something a lot more gross.

It's called damage control and yes it's crazy that we blindly allow this kind of society-wide manipulation.

You mean influencer behavior. Tiktok/instagram/etc. personalities are very different from how most people behave in the real world. I don't know anyone who has bought into either of these products.

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