While I agree with the sentiment of the article most users do not even know what a server is, much less capable of self-hosting. Syncing a folder over Dropbox or Google Drive, though, is simple enough.

[0]: https://nestful.app

For your app, how do notifications of changes get propagated? Does it depend on the backend (Google Drive, etc) supporting that, or does it just do polling or something?

Yes, I agree this is not an end-all be all solution, but the tradeoff is often worth it.

> Local-first software enables greater longevity because your data, and the software that is needed to read and modify your data, are all stored locally on your computer.

There are many ways to achieve this goal - open document standards, open source servers, a escrowed release of the server, or this idea of a bail out system for taking the current version and self hosting it. All are commendable.

Actually achieving all seven ideals is hard, and there isn't much modern software that does it. But in my view anyone trying to achieve even a few of the ideals is making strides towards a worthy goal.

There is a lot of exciting stuff happening in the local-first software movement at the moment, and a lot of that is related the sync engines that are being built (disclaimer: I work for ElectricSQL, we are building one). These sync engine don't inherently make your software local-first, fitting all the ideals, but they do make it a lot easer to do so. They are an important building block. But there is more needed, we need more open document standards - Automerge, Yjs, Loro and the other CRDT data structures are perfect lower level data structures to build these higher level abstractions on. Martin Kleppmann has talked quite a bit about sync engines that are disconnected from the underlying application, essentially pluggable sync engine, you choose who to use to sync you copy of a document or application - I'm excited to see where this goes.

But, we also need to free up the application distribution platform. The app stores are walled gardens that prevent some business models, native apps (while performant) are tied to a specific platform (or even version!), and the web is inherently tied to servers and browsers. The web platform though, i.e. JS, HTML, CSS, is perfect for building high longevity software that runs anywhere, on any device, the issue is the distribution. We need a middle ground, an application package that built on web standards, but isn't tied to a server. I want to download a bundled app to my machine and have a copy, email to a family member, or even open and hack on it. Thats the final missing piece.

A downloadedable app, with an open and pluggable sync engine would achieve the same goles of this ejectable idea.

Somehow, this thing is still not available for testing yet. Not hating but isn’t this supposed to be the category where new solutions launch every single day? While I am still very much interested, I’ve lost any hope that this will become a real thing to try out any time soon.

- They don't get backed up or synced between devices.

- It's very easy to delete them (e.g, you clear browsing data) or lose them (e.g., you get a new computer).

- Users barely know about them, so they don't know they should "preserve them". For users PWAs are basically just a way to get a launcher for the app, and they have no visibility over locally-stored data.

I think browsers right now are not the right platform to give a future-proof guarantee. Disclaimer: I say this while working on a product that wants to become that platform¹, so I've had the chance of thinking about this problem quite a lot in the past few months.

¹ I wrote a bit about it at https://pscanf.com/s/340/, if you're interested.

In their current state, I personally don't find PWAs + local databases ergonomic enough. So actually what I'm hoping to get out of the platform I'm building is - somewhat egotistically - an alternative that works for me personally and possibly for a few others like-minded individuals, not a browser replacement to take over the world.

I would love to see another way to deploy local software, aside from building dedicated Windows and MacOS apps. There are efforts in the Docker container world to provide smaller deployment frameworks. There are efforts in the WASM world to replace containers with WASM deployment (which works well in browser, BTW).

I agree as well here, and from that complement I hope to be able to draw a small community around my product. Still, I pessimistically feel that it's too small a share of users to make browser vendors take notice and build features for them. But of course I'd love if they'd prove me wrong. :)

You can always start with the cloud version and then transfer to self-hosted if you change your mind and continue right where you left off. Not just that, you can also move from self-hosted back to cloud. That makes it easier to get start with a service because you're free to change your mind without lock-in or risk of painful migrations.