CfP is open! May 1 — CFP closes May 15 — candidates notified June 1 — speakers announced June 15 — schedule announced We want to hear from YOU!

Lab Day will not be purely filled with talks - but also show live demos, creative experiments, and community projects. A collaborative day that’s part unconference, part showcase, and shaped by the ideas that animate our community. Lab Day is included in your ticket localfirstconf.com

The local-first community in Berlin has such brilliant energy; the talks from last year's conf still ripple through everything I'm building. What's the specific topic or talk thread you're most drawn to this year?

This is our third time out with Local-First Conf! In past years we've thoroughly explored some core topics like sync engines and CRDTs. In 2026, we're broadening into areas like identity, e2ee, malleable software, and open-weight models.

Tickets for Local-First Conf 2026 are now on sale July 12–14 · Berlin · 300 people · single track Theme: user empowerment in an age of fluid software. We're going beyond CRDTs and sync. If you're building for user agency, this is your conference. Tickets live now → localfirstconf.com

Over on dead-Twitter, @geoffreylitt.com asked the following question last week: "I desperately need a Matt Levine style explanation of how OAuth works. What is the historical cascade of requirements that got us to this place?" Here's my attempt at an answer: leaflet.pub/p/did:plc:3v...

Two weeks of real-world use on Firehose, my email triage prototype. • 572 emails automatically labeled • 77% coverage (confident labels) • 98.2% accuracy on confident ✨

All peer-to-peer systems have to compromise one way or another on this: they can decide that direct P2P is essential and simply fail, they can provide centralized fallback alternatives, or they can try to find/convince/incentivize another peer to route traffic on your behalf.

Exciting news for the local-first community! 1. Local-first Conf Berlin is back on 12–14 July: www.localfirstconf.com 2. The nice folks at @cultrepo.bsky.social have made a documentary about the movement: www.youtube.com/watch?v=10d8...

Local-First Conf is back in 2026 for a third installment. This year we'll double down on what's worked in the past... but do a few things differently.

We’re back. Save the date: www.localfirstconf.com

10m documentary film on the local-first software movement! www.youtube.com/watch?v=10d8...

The London Future of coding meetup came back last night! Now renamed to "the feeling of computing". More context on the name change: feelingof.com/the-name/ I handed over running it to @todepond.com, @mimireyburn.bsky.social, and Chee. They're doing great – same energy and wild demos as always

Can an algorithm learn your life priorities when sorting email? In the first phase of my “personal information firehose” reseach, I trained an embedding-based classifier: adamwiggins.com/posts/triag...

We're all drinking from an information firehose, because sending messages via computer is frictionless. But I believe we should be able to apply social media-style algorithms to help! My new research project: adamwiggins.com/posts/perso...

After six years working on commercial products, happy to say I’m returning to the research world. Today I start as a Researcher-in-Residence at @inkandswitch.com

True peer-to-peer connections without server intermediation remains elusive for local first. Great to see ongoing research in this area.

Kinopio Year-End Investor Report As you may know, Kinopio is organic software that's completely community funded. But if you're reading this, as far as I’m concerned, you’re invested in the future of Kinopio. ↓ 1/10

The first batch of talks are published, the remaining will be published by end of week. 🌟 youtube.com/playlist?lis...

So much good stuff happening at @inkandswitch.com these days! www.inkandswitch.com/newsletter/...

We’re hosting @syncconf.bsky.social Community Day and have an open space to drop in, hack, do demos, and connect with others working on sync and related systems. Feel free to drop in during the day, we’ll do a few group discussions in the afternoon. luma.com/l28n75qt

@adamwiggins.bsky.social calling out a lot of important things in his talk: Idealism vs pragmatism in software Preventing data lockin during this AI shift Longevity of software and data preservation

Preview of my @syncconf.bsky.social talk Just five days away now, getting excited!

Getting excited for the conf, just 2.5 weeks away The density of top-notch developers speaking (and attending) is off the charts!

Four of the top minds in web development on stage together! 🔥

It's a huge amount of work to run a CFP process, but also rewarding. Hope to write a debrief post about how we did it at some point.

The Holy Grail for web apps is when my Passkey can unlock local private data.

Sync seems to be having a moment among web developers!

I bought my ticket already and will be there! Figuring out which of my colleagues at @inkandswitch.com might join us, and maybe a little community hacking alongside.

Have something to say about sync engines, local first, or sync as an enabler for AI agents? Submit your talk soon.

Announcing Sync Conf 2025. Join us in SF on Nov 12th.

“The syncing model solves a fundamental challenge of most modern web apps out there, and it does it in a way that feels, well… better.” frontendatscale.com/issues/50/

“The concept is beautifully simple: instead of your app being a fancy form that sends data to a server, it has its own local database. Sometimes the server is just another client to sync with. It can be a fundamental inversion of how we build web applications.” bytemash.net/posts/i-went...

“It’s magical to update a row in Postgres and instantly see the UI reflect that change. This simplifies background tasks, makes multi-device and multi-user flows easier to reason about, and reduces boilerplate. Just write to Postgres and let the sync engine do the rest.” neon.com/blog/tanstac...

😍 Eng manager job working on storage APIs, workers, etc for Firefox. Relevant to improving local-first apps in the browser! www.mozilla.org/en-US/career...

A helpful graph made by @stevekrouse.com on the inverse relationship between vibes and understanding in AI assisted code. Put a few thoughts down here: maggieappleton.com/2025-08-vibe... Original article: blog.val.town/vibe-code

📄✨ New paper! Emilie Ma (kewbi.sh) and I looked at the problem of users of end-to-end encrypted apps recovering their private keys if their device is lost, broken, or stolen. We found a cryptographic approach that is decentralised and resilient against social engineering arxiv.org/abs/2507.21122

Do you write TypeScript? Enjoy Automerge? Love building both tools and community? You might be a great fit for our ✨new✨ Automerge TypeScript Maintainer role! www.inkandswitch.com/jobs/automer... (Remote role, 🇬🇧 UK-based preferred but not required)

Automerge 3 is here: the heart transplant is complete! Huge improvements in memory usage and (in most cases) correspondingly big performance improvements too. Backwards compatible on disk and the network so there's no reason not to upgrade today: automerge.org/blog/automer...

This pattern is at the core of how @livestore.dev handles sync, offline support, and conflict detection — and it’s been really fun diving deep into it while working on the upcoming course. If you’ve ever wanted to build local-first apps that sync like magic, this approach is worth understanding.

Malleable software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps www.inkandswitch.com/essay/mallea...

Introducing… (Not Boring) Camera 3 years, 100+ prototypes, and wild graphics tech to make our perfect camera. Only to say… forget perfection. Just have fun and capture life’s beautiful chaos. Hope you love it as much as we do—thumbprints and all 🖤 notbor.ing/camera

Nice impressions from @localfirstconf.com (photography by Susanne Elsässer)

Reflections as an organizer of @localfirstconf.com this year Twice the size (350+ people) and twice as much content (two full days of talks) I think we did reasonably well on keeping quality up even as we scaled quantity!

My takeaways from this year's @localfirstconf.com Last year we collectively were at the stage of “hey this syncing tech is cool, you don’t need the cloud as much” and “hey, we have a community here, who knew?” This year it felt like the community had more cohesion and sense of identity.

We're counting down days! Here’s Everything You Need to Know for Local-First Conf 2025

The cleverness isn’t in the lenses; it’s in that user-owned fabric. Build it offline-first, merge-friendly, and secure by default, and the rest is just UI paint. Someday today’s file-juggling will feel like punch cards. Let’s start weaving the fabric and sanding the lenses now.

What if you didn't need git to collaborate on games? We've been prototyping a new approach to collaboration in Godot: live and async collaborative editing, with branches and diffs, built right into the editor. We're looking for people to test out an early version, see link in next post:

Announcing the Local-First Landscape A comprehensive guide to help developers choose the right tools for building local-first applications. localfirst.fm/landscape

Sync/local-first fits together beautifully with streaming LLM chats, as illustrated by the videos in this post