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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Both new to me, thanks—will read up.
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thanks .
Founder of here Andy 👋
We designed a file system on top of IPFS, this is a presentation that goes into detail blog.fission.codes/web-native-fil
We’re participating with the to work on personal data store standards
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Thanks! I'm very excited about the distributed design direction. Unfortunately a file system doesn't quite fit my application model: I'd still need to build a database on top of this for querying/indexing. I see there's a TODO for databases in the white paper?
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yep. Happy to connect you with if you want to help define what you need / what you want to see out of a distributed database.
We’re committed to building it.
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I'm glad you all are working on that! Alas this project already has a lot of risks, so I'll be looking for a more "boring" solution at the data layer.
yep! Mostly people like are hand rolling stacks.
As far as we can tell — especially for multi-user & offline — there isn’t much that’s turn key.
Will watch where you end up. Good luck!
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