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Local-First Software

2020-08-15 16:30:56.833488+00 by Dan Lyke 5 comments

I'm kinda weird in the solutions that we deploy at home because I like to start with systems that own our own data, and that we can get the information into and out of in the original form. We don't have a lot of cloud services, and I'd much rather have a shared drive mount point that gets sync'd to S3 than some OS add-on that does some sort of sharing that I don't understand the semantics of (eg: Google Drive, Dropbox).

As Charlene is going to a Mac, it's a little harder to implement some of this, Macs don't interoperate well (yesterday evening I plugged a USB stick into the home server and used rsync because getting the Mac to mount a USB stick is not a consistent process...), so I'm looking around at what new solutions are...

Anyway, I found this a worthwhile read on different classes of software and how we can think about them:

Local-first software You own your data, in spite of the cloud

Via https://reb00ted.org/quick-notes/20200809-local-first-software/

[ related topics: Invention and Design Software Engineering Macintosh ]

comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):

#Comment Re: Local-First Software made: 2020-08-16 01:54:14.822439+00 by: TheSHAD0W

I'm waiting for a home IoT spec, where I can set up my own standard server and no longer worry about companies going out of business or leaking access.

#Comment Re: Local-First Software made: 2020-08-16 22:58:49.423246+00 by: brainopener [edit history]

You looked at rclone?

This problem has been on my mind a lot. I've got data synced locally and with DropBox (plus backups) but feel like eventually DropBox will totally be unsuitable for me (their trajectory is disturbing to me).

#Comment Re: Local-First Software made: 2020-08-17 00:48:26.330389+00 by: TheSHAD0W

I've used Nextcloud, which has some plusses. It's nice to be able to automatically sync a folder. Though I'm not really fond of the way it works. Might want to write something similar, that's more suitable for backups, sort of like Mac's Time Machine, but better.

#Comment Re: Local-First Software made: 2020-08-17 23:44:00.68576+00 by: Dan Lyke

Yeah, Nextcloud seemed to put a hell of a lot of effort into stuff that doesn't matter to me. Rclone looks pretty good, I'll experiment with that. Going straight to s3 buckets has a lot of appeal.

Re owning your own home IoT stuff, a friend pointed me at this. I haven't looked at it deeply because I don't want any more shit to fail: https://makezine.com/2020/08/0...-up-your-own-private-smart-home/

#Comment Re: Local-First Software made: 2020-08-22 03:18:24.657103+00 by: concept14

Then there are the add-ons that I have come to understand all too well, e.g. Microsoft OneNote where the semantics are that every week or so it decides one of your notebooks is corrupt and it won't even try to synchronize.

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