Local-first Software

Cloud apps like Google Docs and Trello are popular because they enable real-time collaboration with colleagues, and they make it easy for us to access our work from all of our devices. However, by centralizing data storage on servers, cloud apps also take away ownership and agency from users. If a service shuts down, the software stops functioning, and data created with that software is lost.

Local-first is 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.

Lab Notes

Chronicling our work-in-progress as it happens, most recently on Keyhive and Patchwork.

Essay

To date, one of our lab's most oft-cited works is Local-first software: you own your data, in spite of the cloud. It coined the term local-first, and articulated the vision for all our subsequent research in this area.

Projects

Keyhive

2024–2025
A local-first access control system with capabilities and end-to-end encryption for secure & trusted collaboration.

Patchwork

2024
A research project about version control software for writers, developers, and other creatives.

Peritext

2021
Collaboration on rich text is hard to model with plain-text approaches. We review the challenges and how to construct a CRDT for rich text.

Backchannel

2021
A design experiment in digital identity that excludes the problem of users misrepresenting themselves by reconsidering digital introductions.

PushPin

2020
Taking peer-to-peer beyond research prototypes, and working towards commercial-grade P2P collaboration software.