It's astonishing to me how difficult it (still) is to design a syncable local-first data model.
I keep thinking I've found a decent way, then realizing its flaws, then despondently noticing that the flaws were already discussed in Ink & Switch's article: inkandswitch.com/local-first.ht
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Arguably things are even worse than discussed in that article. Take Firebase, for instance: it implements offline caching, but that's very different from sync. You have to design a whole replication strategy on top to get something like "a synced file format."
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CouchDB seems like the closest solution, if you can design a conflict-free model. But I spent the last week getting into the details of actually operating a multi-user service, and I am now quite thoroughly spooked!
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Did you consider a eventsourced system ? Pushing only the changes around may give some (eventual) consistency.
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Yep, that's what I do now, but it's still consuming a huge amount of complexity.
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My experience is that it’s quite an amount of work with less technical complexity to work around. Although the eventsourced system as such adds complexity for sure.
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