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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Hey 👋 yes, the idea is to build a CRDT-backed, local first distributed database that works well in browsers, on top of our file system. It’s not built yet. Totally understand that you’re looking to derisk! I’d still love to pick your brain on requirements if you have time 🙏
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That sounds like a great project! Have to stay focused on my research, so I must decline most synchronous meetings, but happy to chat by email andy@andymatuschak.org.