2026.11.12

📰 News & Discussions

Before you build a sync engine

"For the last couple of years I’ve been building Flex, a visual editor at Ceros where several people, and more recently AI agents, edit the same document at the same time. A big part of that work has been its sync engine, which is designed to cope with flaky connections and keeps a full version history. We built it on Yjs, rebuilt the way changes flow through it once, and learnt most of what’s in this series the hard way."

From the server to SQLite to reactive Svelte state

"We wanted Milieu to feel fast and dependable wherever you use it. You should be able to organise your day on a flight, look up a contact on the underground, or keep working through an internet outage. Even with a good connection, there’s no reason for every interaction to wait for a server."

The POND Principle: For a Human-Machine Intelligence Ecosystem

"POND is the community for thinkers, designers, builders and all people who support a personal, private, participatory future of distributed and decentralized Human-Machine intelligence."

Jazz 2.0.0-alpha.60: now based on SQLite, first step of our pivot to serverless and self-hosting

"Why alpha.60 moves Jazz onto SQLite, how it runs inside your own backend, and how to upgrade"

🛠️ Tools & Resources

Subduction

"Subduction is a peer-to-peer synchronization protocol and implementation for CRDTs. It enables efficient synchronization of encrypted, partitioned data between peers without requiring a central server."

Tandem

"Tandem is an open-source sync engine that plugs into your existing infrastructure. Add the Tandem libraries to sync data in real time across your clients and server. No new services to deploy."

BackendRelay

"BackendRelay is a self-hosted realtime backend: a native Rust server on top of PostgreSQL, a web dashboard, and compatibility with the InstantDB client SDKs. Build apps with relational queries, live subscriptions, optimistic updates, authentication, permission rules, file storage and presence, and run the whole backend on your own infrastructure."

ZeBridge

"ZeBridge keeps a local database on each device, queues writes while it is offline, and synchronizes through NATS when it reconnects. PostgreSQL remains authoritative: it applies the rules, resolves conflicting writes, and returns a verdict to the app."

✨ Apps

ReadMachine

"A local-first reading library for macOS, built around your own files."

Knit

"Knit is a messenger that doesn't need internet or cell signal. Nearby phones pass your messages along over Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, so you can find friends across a crowd and keep the group in touch. You don't need a server or an account to use it."

Nesso

"A desktop app for learning, with a personal knowledge graph that grows with you." "One graph, on your device, in an open format: Your graph is stored locally as JSON-LD, an open format you can export and take with you."

HealthCoach

"Your Health, Your Data, Strictly Private: A unified, multi-platform health and wellness companion for tracking blood pressure, body metrics, calorie targets, and nutrition journal entries across Desktop and Mobile."

How to Contribute

Anyone can contribute to Local-First News with a pull request. Instructions and guidelines available here.

Sponsors

Local-First News is sponsored by PowerSync. Interested in sponsoring? Get in touch