2025.12.04

📰 News & Discussions

“The local-first rebellion”: How Home Assistant became the most important project in your house

"Home Assistant is now running in more than 2 million households, orchestrating everything from thermostats and door locks to motion sensors and lighting. All on users’ own hardware, not the cloud. The contributor base behind that growth is just as remarkable: 21,000 contributors in a single year, feeding into one of GitHub’s most lively ecosystems at a time when a new developer joins GitHub every second."

Ink & Switch Dispatch 014

"We’ve accelerated our work on Keyhive, a capabilities-based auth system specially designed for local-first software, to prepare it for GAIOS. Adding access control is an important step for collaborative systems like GAIOS and Patchwork: it defines who can connect, who can request documents, and lays the groundwork for richer permissions in the future."

Local-first is not offline-first

"[L]ocal-first treats offline capability as a natural side effect of giving the local device authority over the data."

Local-first, why now?

"In short, advancements to browser storage capabilities and APIs were a big driver to making the local-first movement possible. Browsers now have the tools—OPFS, WebAssembly, and IndexedDB—to handle robust, offline-first applications. Now on to just making local-first happen."

Building ElectricSQL in Elixir | James Arthur, San Francisco Global Elixir Meetup

"This talk was presented at San Francisco Global Elixir Meetups, which was a part of Global Elixir Meetups."

🛠️ Tools & Resources

TanStack DB + Electric SQL is the stack I’m most excited about right now

"Unlock the power of TanStack DB + ElectricSQL in this deep-dive walkthrough. In this video, we explore how Electric SQL brings real-time sync, shapes, subscriptions, and normalized data flows to the frontend, and how TanStack DB gives you a modern, type-safe, reactive client layer that feels magical to work with."

SyncKit

"A powerful, type-safe sync engine for building real-time collaborative applications. Local-first, CRDT-based, with zero-config offline support." See also: HN discussion

Loro Extended

"A toolkit for building local-first applications and multi-agent systems with Loro. @loro-extended adds a pleasant layer of abstraction--schemas, network synchronization, persistence, and reactivity--to a raw CRDT engine called Loro. It's built to make it easy to focus on distributed application logic, instead of the usual shuttling of state between peers, clients, agents, etc. in a distributed system."

Announcing DocNode: TypeScript OT library for local-first apps

"A type-safe, fast, ID-based Operational Transformation (OT) framework. CRDT mode in progress." See also HN discussion and Reddit discussion

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