(2023-08-03) The Cloud Is A Prison Can The Localfirst Software Movement Set Us Free

The Cloud Is a Prison. Can the Local-First Software Movement Set Us Free? The phrase—“local-first software”— had an artisanal, farm-to-table sort of ring, at once familiar and flicking at something new. Perhaps some engineers dismissed it as merely a marketing term. But others whittling away their workday afternoons seemed to see it as the solution to a problem they had long sensed: The software they were writing was broken.

One of the first Hacker News links referred to a white paper published in 2019, coauthored by a computer scientist then at the University of Cambridge named Martin Kleppmann and a group of open source developers at an independent “industrial research lab” called Ink and Switch.

The word “local” in the name refers to your personal computer. “First” means your computer is prioritized over “someone else’s.” If you and I wanted to work on a document together, we would no longer have to depend on some Google data center in the Oregon high desert to maintain the master copy.

The journalist and science fiction author Cory Doctorow uses the term “enshittification” to describe how platform capitalism squanders useful technology... This is “how platforms die,” Doctorow writes. Cold business logic blazes this sorry path, but technological choices pave it.

The night at the museum is Kleppman’s favorite part of Strange Loop, which might just be his favorite developer conference. It’s an event that merges joy and weirdness with practicality—his ideal combination

Kleppmann is perhaps best known for a textbook called Designing Data-Intensive Applications, which explains the fundamentals of moving lots of data around vast computer systems.

The seeds of the local-first manifesto can be found in a little box on page 174 of Kleppmann’s book. It describes something called a conflict-free replicated data type, or CRDT.

By computing standards, though, CRDTs themselves were old. They were co-developed by a French computer theorist named Marc Shapiro about two decades ago

Shapiro and his colleague Nuno Preguiça wondered: Did people have to be online to collaborate online? Or could they work offline and collaborate peer-to-peer?

tricks to preserve order can also make the CRDT horribly inefficient.

Shapiro and Preguiça initially published their CRDT algorithm as a technical report. Shapiro thought about starting a company focused on collaborative editing. “A few months later, bang, Google Docs comes out,” he tells me.

The new software used an older process for merging changes called operational transformation, or OT, and still relied on a central Google server.

He cofounded a startup (called Rapportive, it integrated data from social media profiles into email contacts); he moved to the Bay Area (closer to investors and social media giants); his startup was acquired by a tech juggernaut (LinkedIn). Kleppmann lasted a few years before leaving to take a research position at Cambridge.

He describes Shapiro’s paper as “an awakening.” In CRDTs, Kleppmann saw the technical basis for a new class of software that no one was providing.

He set about coding an open source implementation of CRDTs, which he called Automerge, that people could freely use to build apps.

I met Peter van Hardenberg, one of Kleppmann’s coauthors, in a café in San Francisco. He was, like Kleppmann, rebooting after a long journey through the cloud, first as part of the founding team at Heroku

He wanted to show me an app called Pushpin, envisioned as a digital corkboard. Van Hardenberg pulled up a blank project on his iPad

The technical groundwork was being laid, he believed, for local-first versions of Slack, Discord, Google Docs, Photoshop

Strange Loop was teeming with local-first presentations—a surprise to Kleppmann and van Hardenberg, who had until recently kept track of every project through Google Alerts and word of mouth.

CRDTs were turning up in the wider world too. Developers at The Washington Post had used them to build a tool for arranging articles on the homepage. People poking around in the code that runs Apple’s Notes app had noticed CRDTs. Jupyter Notebooks, a popular data science app, restored its collaboration tools using CRDTs after Google got rid of the cloud service it had previously depended on.

Among the presenters at Strange Loop was a Canadian developer named Brooklyn Zelenka, cofounder of a company called Fission.

theoretically I could run the prototype that’s posted online, since it’s open source—“but please don’t do that,” he told me. He would let me know when local-first was ready.