Hacker News: arrowtrench

New comment by arrowtrench in "Why haven't local-first apps become popular?"

arrowtrench — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 17:08:33 +0000

Is local-first bad / more difficult for collaboration because of conflict resolution? (E.g., two users edit the same document when they're offline and then, during syncing, they find that their versions diverge too much for them to be merged cleanly.) If so, isn't it possible to mark certain assets as "undivergable" which would effectively mean that the program would act like a traditional cloud-first type of app for that specific asset? This middle ground could introduce too much complexity and some inconsistency, but it could prove useful in certain cases.

New comment by arrowtrench in "Why haven't local-first apps become popular?"

arrowtrench — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 16:44:46 +0000

Offline read-only would already be a great feature for me, knowing that my data is always close to machine. But, my guess is that this isn't enough of a killer feature for most people to care.

New comment by arrowtrench in "Why haven't local-first apps become popular?"

arrowtrench — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 16:37:42 +0000

Maybe the OP is saying that the advantage of "self-hosted [traditional/non-local-first] apps" over "local-first apps synced to someone else's server" is that with the former you get to control the server. Of course, there's nothing stopping you from using a local-first app that syncs to your own server, though.

New comment by arrowtrench in "Cloudflare is sponsoring Ladybird and Omarchy"

arrowtrench — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 16:16:13 +0000

Managing servers that store terabytes of data for you isn't exactly the same as configuring and stitching Linux programs together.