2025.08.21

📰 News & Discussions

Work Now, Sync Later: Local-First Web Apps

"I think sync engines are the future. These slides show why. Slides [...] that I just presented at KCDC." - @housecor

Lessons learned from building a sync-engine and reactivity system with SQLite

"Over the last couple of months, I've been trying to build the dream: A local-first, end-to-end encrypted and reactive app, with all of the user's data in a local SQL database but continually synced to a remote server. This article summarizes my learning and how I ended up building a minimal sync engine for SQLite with full reactivity." See also HN discussion

Local Cloud Emulation

"Adopting a local first approach not only improves DX, but also engenders a more flexible, cloud-agnostic system. This can be achieved by building in-memory versions of platform services. While daunting at first, it ends up being much simpler than expected."

LoFi/29 Community Meetup

LoFi/29 is scheduled for Tuesday August 26th at 8am PT.

OrbitDB Workshop 1

"Inspiraluna will be hosting an OrbitDB training session. In our first workshop, we will be covering: A brief introduction to local-first, peer-to-peer architecture; Building an OrbitDB-powered app in the browser; Connecting two peers and sync-ing databases." Wednesday, August 27
2:00 PM - 3:00 PM GMT+2

DWeb Meetup — The State of the DWeb: P2P, Local-First & Where to go from here

"Join us at our next virtual meetup on August 27 at 10am PT and come hear Brooklyn and Andreas share the state of the DWeb, through a specific lens of local-first and P2P methods. The presentations will be followed by a Q&A with the speakers." Wednesday, August 27, 12-1:30pm CDT (online)

🛠️ Tools & Resources

OrbitDB: Peer-to-Peer Databases for the Decentralized Web

"OrbitDB is a serverless, distributed, peer-to-peer database. OrbitDB uses IPFS as its data storage and IPFS Pubsub to automatically sync databases with peers. It’s an eventually consistent database that uses CRDTs for conflict-free database merges making OrbitDB an excellent choice for decentralized apps (dApps), blockchain applications and offline-first web applications."

Synchrotron

"An opinionated yet flexible approach to offline-first data sync with PGlite, Electric SQL, and Effect."

✨ Apps

Show HN: Whispering – Open-source, local-first dictation you can trust

"I’m basically obsessed with local-first open-source software. I think there should be an open-source, local-first version of every app, and I would like them all to work together."

Zedless

"This is Zedless, a fork of Zed that's designed to be privacy-friendly and local-first."

Working offline in Notion — Everything you need to know

"So for 5 years, 'offline' has been the #1 request." "Our team built one of the largest production CRDT systems (Conflict‑free Replicated Data Types). One teammate even wrote a PhD thesis about it!" - @ivanhzhao

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