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Local-First Software Is Easier to Scale

(elijahpotter.dev)
175 points chilipepperhott | 2 comments | 05 Jul 25 15:54 UTC | HN request time: 0.008s | source
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myflash13 ◴[05 Jul 25 17:30 UTC] No.44474202[source]▶
Closest thing to true “serverless”: entire MVC app (Django/Rails/Laravel) in the browser with WASM and data persistence by SQLite over CDN.

All the server has to do then is serve binaries, all the business logic is in the client.

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gjsman-1000 ◴[05 Jul 25 17:31 UTC] No.44474217[source]▶
Brilliant… but now you need to validate that the client did all their business logic correctly without tampering. That alone can be so complex it defeats the point.
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justinrubek ◴[05 Jul 25 17:49 UTC] No.44474340[source]▶
No... you don't need that. Not for the overwhelmingly vast majority of cases. Let people use their own software. Tampering? Not my problem. Let people do it if they want.
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1. Terr_ ◴[05 Jul 25 18:49 UTC] No.44474690[source]▶
The "overwhelmingly cast majority of cases" will be an employee of a larger company, a person/computer that cannot be trusted with arbitrary access to data and exceptions to business rules in code.
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2. drdaeman ◴[05 Jul 25 20:43 UTC] No.44475398[source]▶
If it's a single-user app, you can only load data the user actually needs and is cleared to access. And/or lock down the device.

Multi-user app (and if we're talking about companies, it's multiple users by the very definition) where users are not trusted almost always needs either a central service with all the access controls, or a distributed equivalent of it (which is, indeed, very hard to implement). “Local-first” in those cases becomes less relevant, it’s more of a “on-premises/self-host” in this case.

But I think while end-user non-business software can be small compared to enterprise stuff, it is still a fairly big market with lots of opportunities.