Cloud apps like Google Docs and Trello are popular because they enable real-time collaboration with colleagues, and they make it easy for us to access our work from all of our devices. However, by centralizing data storage on servers, cloud apps also take away ownership and agency from users. If a service shuts down, the software stops functioning, and data created with that software is lost.
In this article we propose “local-first software”: a set of principles for software that enables both collaboration and ownership for users. Local-first ideals include the ability to work offline and collaborate across multiple devices, while also improving the security, privacy, long-term preservation, and user control of data.
My personal ideal would be an open source server, but with an added clause to the license that requires any server using the code to allow any user to export their data in a format that’s both human and machine readable at any time (you’d need to work on the language, but basically you want all the user facing fields to be labeled as the user would expect). Then anyone can provide the service at whatever cost they think is fair so users aren’t forced to be tech savvy to use it, but users aren’t locked in to a single provider and can run their own as desired.
An alternative is clear legislation that requires any service period provides a user all their data in machine readable format and explicitly provides protection against any IP related claims for other platforms to import that user data into their own services.