An article summarizing several years of research and prototyping on how principles of local first software can lead to increased user agency and data ownership. The Ink & Switch team built several prototypes, made a lot of use of Dat Protocol, and explored CRDTs as a fundamental building block for syncing / merging distributed data.
In this article we propose “local-first software”: a set of principles for software that enables both collaboration and ownership for users. Local-first ideals include the ability to work offline and collaborate across multiple devices, while also improving the security, privacy, long-term preservation, and user control of data.
Ink & Switch suggests a number of principles, or ideals as they call them: