is "local first" completely co-opted by big tech yet?
looking at the conference that just happened..
- very non-local-first sponsors
- extremely un-diverse speakers
- website doesn't work on my phone
- the tadi web is dead
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@TodePond When I mentioned that I saw this trajectory locked in like half a year ago, a friend who pays closer attention than me said it had alreasy gotten there even before that.
https://icosahedron.website/@gaditb/116115120146503634
My take, which I don't deserve to have because I'm not involved and Doing Anything, is that it's not a question of if it's being corrupted/coopted, it's a question of "can the companies jumping on the term because Flashy Trend be further manipulated into funding any more worthwhile building&research,
in a way that doesn't compromise the moral understanding of the upcoming generation of students now learning."
And rather than "is the term being poisoned" (whose answer is already yes) when the answer to THAT question becomes "no, we can't anymore",
then that's the time to call it a wrap and gather up the driftwood to loudly give the term its viking funeral.
@gaditb right, i see, poisoning / co-opting might be good if the concept influences companies positively. but it can be bad if the companies affect the concept negatively
@TodePond I don't think there are really "if"s there. I think it will have very limited ability to influence companies positively -- that, at best, incorporating local-first tooling/libraries will improve things at the margins. (Google Docs maybe offline mode not sucking as much. Baseline off-the-shelf components maybe being less literally-unusable on some axes in a highly-constrained-bandwidth+latency situation like Antarctica ( https://brr.fyi/posts/engineering-for-slow-internet ). If we're really lucky some public-private-partnership transit app will reset the baseline expectations to be basically-still-fully-functional-in-tunnels/between-wifi in a way the "here's my hobbyist take" FLOSS apps will be able to copy. etc.)
@TodePond But the primary value I see in local-first is, as the Willow protocol folk point to, the ways it can hopefully remove and undermine many of the choke-points in the tech that allowed whoever controlled them to rent-seek or surveil the users, and control the landscape.
But those are EXACTLY the levers of power that companies call "value" to their investors/board/shareholders. They will not be influenced positively away from those.
@TodePond And I think it's not an "if" about companies affecting the concept negatively. They definitely will, they definitely already are. For comparison, whatever the term "DeFi/Decentralized Finance" did to the concept of "decentralized". For that matter, everything that happened around crypto/cryptography when the "let's reinvent every financial vulnerability from first principles" wave of money hit, that caused @sarahjamielewis to need to boil it down succinctly to "The thing you are supposed to be decentralizing is power." That was in response to specific projects and specific ongoing corruption of the term.
But what was also happening at that time, nevertheless, was that while the concept was being dismantled, among the scams, some of the money was also finding its way to some genuinely valuably-decentralizing projects and power-reshaping research.
@TodePond I do not expect common ground here. In the language of McKenzie Wark's "A Hacker Manifesto" (2004, https://hackermanifesto.org/en/english/ ), local-first is attempting to redirect as much as possible of the vectors of communication&reliance&control away from their current routing directly through the narrow chokepoints which let them be commodified, and to restore power to those subject to those vectors. That commodification IS the first step of accumulation and value-extractration of vectoralist ownership. The freedom being fought for is incompatible with that mode of exploitation.
@gaditb right, this more closely matches my understanding :)
@TodePond imo ‘local-first’ has always felt like a gentrification of p2p
@gwil @TodePond Remember that "p2p" as a term got hugely gentrified, to the degree where people like Tim O'Reilly were sitting on stage giving big speeches about p2p when talking about what is basically web 2.0's centralization. We've got it back fully now that all those people left
That said, I wasn't aware "local first" had gotten this co-opted yet, and I only got the sense of that for the first time hearing from a friend yesterday who made the summit (alas, I did not). I always interpreted it as "p2p, with an emphasis on CRDTs"
"how to do local-first. a tutorial by cloudflare"
can't make this shit up
meanwhile, pastagang is speedrunning local-first maximalism over on mastodon and is [—]
speak to me when you've survived a pastapocalypse
