The idea that your data should live on your device, work offline, sync without a server owning it, and outlast the company that made the app. One essay started the movement; the rest is the tooling that has slowly made it practical. (Bindle is not local-first — it's a hosted archive — which is exactly why I keep reading this list.)
The founding essay. Seven ideals — fast, multi-device, offline, collaborative, longevity, privacy, user control — and an honest scorecard of how badly both cloud apps and old desktop apps meet them. Start here.
Conflict-free replicated data types are the maths that makes merge-without-a-server possible. This is the field's home page: papers, implementations, and a plain-language explanation of why it works.
Ink & Switch's own CRDT library, a JSON-shaped document that any number of devices can edit and merge. The reference implementation of the essay's ideas.
The other major CRDT library, and the one most collaborative editors actually ship. If you've typed in a shared doc that wasn't Google's, there's a fair chance Yjs was underneath.
Lists on Bindle are hand-picked links with a note on each. Every link is archived, so it stays readable even after the original page is gone. More lists
Sync a slice of Postgres into the client and keep it live. The pragmatic path: keep your existing database, get local-first reads and optimistic writes.
From the people who built Replicache: a sync engine where the client queries a local cache and the server fills it in. The most ambitious of the current wave.
Postgres/MongoDB to SQLite on the device, with a rules layer for who syncs what. Used in production by people who needed offline mobile apps before it was fashionable.
The community hub: meetups, talks, and a directory of projects. Where the people on this list talk to each other.
The research lab behind the essay, and a decade of prototypes about what computing could be if the user were in charge. Everything they publish is worth reading; this is the index.