2025.03.27

📰 News & Discussions

LoFi/24 Community Meetup

LoFi/24 took place on March 25, 2025, with talks by Fraol Lemecha ("Using hf/tokenizers in React Native"), Mason Simon ("DIPLOMATIC — Single-Player Sync") and Dan Wexler ("Local-first Audio Search for Professionals")

A synchronization engine for everyone

"I love storing user data on the client. It helps with privacy, data ownership (which prevents enshittification), and allows users to run mundane computations (like indexing) on their devices instead of sharing a sliver of a server's CPU time. [...] To achieve this, you need a synchronization engine: a mechanism allowing eventually convergent state to replicate across all of a user's devices and, if needed, to the backend."

localfirst.fm #22 – Paul Butler: Jamsocket

"The guest of this episode is Paul Butler, founder of Jamsocket and creator of the Y-Sweet project. This conversation will delve into building vs buying a sync engine and explore the various projects behind Jamsocket including Plane, Y-Sweet and ForeverVM."

jazz.tools vibe coding micro‑hackathon (upcoming event)

"jazz.tools lets you build apps with cloud-synced local state, no backends & databases needed [...] We want to make Jazz the most vibe-codable framework out there, so we’re hosting a micro-hackathon where you put it through its paces and show everyone who is the 🐐 at vibing whole apps into existence." Tuesday, April 1st 6pm PT, San Francisco

I won't connect my dishwasher to your cloud - Hacker News

"[Y]ou have to connect your dishwasher to WiFi, set up a cloud account in something called Home Connect, and then, and only then, can you start using all the features on the dishwasher." This article generated quite a bit of discussion on HN, including on local-first software.

🛠️ Tools & Resources

Discover PGLite

"Discover PGLite, a 3MB WASM version of PostgreSQL that runs right in your browser! This video shows you how to build a React to-do app with reactive queries, IndexedDB persistence, full-text search, multi-tab support, and more."

✨ Apps

Modernbanc: Accounting software that works for you

"[W]e built our own in-house real-time sync engine to ensure it’s lightning fast, works offline, and keeps your business finances at your fingertips." - gregorygev on HN

Observer AI: Your Personal AI Assistant, Running Locally

"Observer AI remains 100% open source and local-first" "All processing happens locally on your machine. Your data never leaves your computer."

Composer (DXOS)

"Composer is a collaborative productivity app where developers can build and organize knowledge, extend with custom data and UI, and run private AI against their knowledge locally." "Composer has real-time multiplayer implemented through a local-first model."

Dendron

"Dendron is an open-source, local-first, markdown-based, note-taking tool"

Donobu: Continuous Quality for Every Team

"[W]e’re building Donobu, a Mac desktop app. It turns prompts like 'ensure onboarding works' into reliable browser tests, with optional AI (BYOK). It’s local-first, privacy-focused, and built with insights from our Coursera days—where testing hundreds of features across thousands of pages was a nightmare." - vasusen on HN

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