Just came back from Berlin last weekend and the LocalFirst Conf was a total blast.
Detailed report coming later, but just a few key take aways:
- The local first paradigm (see the paper that started it all, published by the same research company that also initiated the conference) would be a great fit for Haiku: data-centric, local data governance, privacy first, offline, not depending on external cloud services and syncing data when needed, also possibly peer-to-peer only.
- there were 2-3 other guys working on a local-first OS (!), so I’m not the only crazy one;-) e.g. Playbit
- I talked with a lot of people about Haiku, its data-centric powers, BeOS roots, and what you can do when your metadata is natively stored with the files and linked at the file system level. There was considerable interest and positive feedback
- I even talked to a guy from Tana, and he immediately got it and asked if it was BFS:) He loved the concept and BeOS/Haiku and will try it out again
- I might finally get some help with funding from a fellow developer who works on a Automator style web API integration flow designer
- so fortunately, it was not just about glorified offline-capable JavaScript libraries and UI frameworks, but really about the core of the idea, this is a tight-knit community with a strong vision that aligns closely with Haiku.
Now let’s get the missing bits and pieces of web tech done in Haiku and show the local-first world that we have the perfect OS for them;-)