I like that more people are thinking solving some of the problems of digital inheritance we face. These are problems that are so important now that so much of our lives are digital and tapping into ones actual social circle seems the best way to do this.
Also, kudos for packaging it as a static web app. That's the one platform I'm willing to bet will still function in 10 years.
As someone who still plays Windows games from 30 years ago and Flash games from ~20 years ago, I'd not be so pessimistic about other platforms, at least when there is no negative sentiment towards it and a good track record of stability. Not to say that the web is not among the best choices
I am sympathetic to the criticism of the naturalistic fallacy, however there are some aspects of modernity that are unquestionably toxic, like air pollution.
Ditto. The entire issue with microplastics is that at certain scale they might have all sorts of bio-active aspects, like BPA and _other_ chemicals used in plastic.
I wish we did more to honor "Unknown unknowns" and make changes more gradually, especially when the difference is barely consequential. Plastic is essential for many things, but not for shopping bags, drink bottles, etc. We over-use it like crazy, and at this point if we find out that omnipresent plastic pollution causes issues, we better hope we find a solution quickly because we won't be able to get rid of the plastic.
It's a very exciting moment for this movement. A lot of the research and tech for local-first is nearing the point that it's mature, efficient, and packaged into well designed APIs.
Moreover, local-first —at least in theory— enables less infrastructure, which could reignite new indie open source software with less vendor lock-in.
However, despite all my excitement about embracing these ideas in the pursuit of better software, there's one hurdle that preventing more wide spread adoption amongst developers, and that is the Web platform.
The Web platform lacks building blocks for distributing hashed and/or signed software that isn't tied to origins. In other words, it's hard to decouple web-apps from the same-origin model which requires you set up a domain and serve requests dynamically.
Service Workers and PWAs do help a bit in terms of building offline experiences, but if you want users to download once, and upgrade when they want (and internet is available), you can't use the Web. So you end up breaking out of the browser, and start using Web technologies outside of the browser with better OS functionality, like Electron, React Native, Tauri et al (the https://userandagents.com/ community is doing some cool experiments in this space).
We need to get back to apps rather than webapps. The hardware compatibility issues of the past are basically no longer here, and there are three major OS types two of which can use each other's apps.
