| Website | https://juliansparber.com |
| Blog | https://blogs.gnome.org/jsparber/ |
Reflection is now actually local-first, and almost the entire code base doesn't care whether you have network, or whether your device can't establish a connection to other devices via p2panda.
Still not merged nor fully polished but we are getting there :)
This Wednesday (September 10th, noon UTC), we're having a virtual meetup / awards ceremony for our Summer of GNOME OS competition!
We'll announce the winners of the Oneplus 6 and our exciting limited-edition shirts (thanks @ondrejkolin for helping with logistics), talk about how it went for everyone, and the future of GNOME OS more generally.
Join us here: https://meet.gnome.org/rooms/roy-7mn-1z3-7er/join
The October edition of #BoilingTheOcean is coming together nicely! We have a venue confirmed (@101lab thanks to @ben4climate!), @ondrejkolin is printing shirts (watch out for preorders soon!), and on Saturday we'll have a DJ set by @jimmac 🪩🌈
You can now sign up by adding your name, and propose sessions and lightning talks here: https://pad.gnome.org/1EIXiLe8Ri2St_ayB8uRHg
On the spring 2024 I presented my candidature, and eventually got elected for the Board of Directors at the GNOME Foundation. Directors are elected democratically by the GNOME Foundation members, and positions are usually up for election every 2 years. However, when I started my term there was one position open for a single year...
Yes, #GUADEC2025 is over. We want to thanks all the in person and remote attendees, the volunteers, the staff and all those made this edition possible! 👏
The initial report is:
- 450 espresso coffee
- ~5kg of sweet pastries
- ~5kg of savory pastries
Looking forward to see you again next year!
P.S. photo album will be published as soon as possible on Flickr
Fuck yeah, the very annoying issue that screenshot notifications were not grouped in GNOME Shell is now fixed 🙌
Huge kudos to @jsparber and @fmuellner!
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/merge_requests/3210
New blog post about our local-first GNOME app initiative! Project Aardvark is growing up into a real app, called Reflection 🪩✨
Over the coming months we have a @PrototypeFund grant to expand the app into a proper local-first Hedgedoc replacement, with multi-cursor, sharing URLs, undo, permissions, and more.
Hopefully the first of many GTK+p2panda apps to come, especially once we add GObject bindings making this stack accessible to non-Rust apps :)
https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2025/06/30/aardvark-summer-2025-update
Yesterday the "Reflection" project started officially as part of the new @PrototypeFund round! 🌟🌈
The team consists of @p2panda and people from the GNOME gang around @tbernard and @jsparber.
We gonna release "Reflection" (formerly Aardvark) - a GTK-based, collaborative, local-first text editor! Aaaand:
All of this is part of a larger effort to explore p2p code, UX patterns, reusable UI components, debugging tools, organize events and document our learnings.
New blog post about our local-first GNOME app initiative! Project Aardvark is growing up into a real app, called Reflection 🪩✨
Over the coming months we have a @PrototypeFund grant to expand the app into a proper local-first Hedgedoc replacement, with multi-cursor, sharing URLs, undo, permissions, and more.
Hopefully the first of many GTK+p2panda apps to come, especially once we add GObject bindings making this stack accessible to non-Rust apps :)
https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2025/06/30/aardvark-summer-2025-update
@tbernard @PrototypeFund
The use case of peer to peer sync that I'm really curious about would be something like a private notes or tasks app, playback positions and listened episodes in a podcast app, stuff like that.
I'd be great if I could sync stuff like that between a phone and a desktop and not have to have a account at some syncing service or selfhost something.
I still do not understand what is meant with 'local-first'. Is there somewhere a good definition?
I guess you use peer to peer technology to sync the data? But how do you do that if both devices are not online at the same time? You just wait when they are?
@Scott_Trakker @tbernard @PrototypeFund Generally, on the high level, a local-first app works as follows. Each peer changes its local version of data, which is usually represented as a CRDT. Once all the peers are online, they exchanged their states/sync messages and get to the same deterministic consistent state.
If interested in more detailed explanation, I'd recommend reading:
- https://www.inkandswitch.com/essay/local-first/
- https://jakelazaroff.com/words/an-interactive-intro-to-crdts/
@3timeslazy @tbernard @PrototypeFund
Thanks for the links! I will dive into it!
@Scott_Trakker @tbernard @PrototypeFund Yes, and they use 'special' techniques to make sure conflicts don't happen (search for Conflict-free replicated datatypes - CRDTs)
(Whether semantic conflicts happen is another matter - if we both edit the same paragraph when offline, it might not be the result either of us had hoped for, but it will be consistently the same for us both)
Seems like https://lofi.so/directory has an interesting catalog of local-first apps.
@Scott_Trakker “In cloud apps, the data on the server is treated as the primary […] copy of the data; if a client has a copy of the data, it is merely a cache that is subordinate to the server. […] In local-first applications we swap these roles: we treat the copy of the data on your local device […] as the primary copy. Servers still exist, but they hold secondary copies of your data in order to assist with access from multiple devices.”
In the same document: “Since local-first applications store the primary copy of their data in each device’s local filesystem, the user can read and write this data anytime, even while offline. It is then synchronized with other devices sometime later, when a network connection is available.“
How was this made possible? “We have found some technologies that appear to be promising foundations […] the family of distributed systems algorithms called Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs).”
@tbernard @PrototypeFund That’s incredible! Everytime you were discussing local first here, I thought you were speaking of individually used digital services like cloud storage or password managers. I did not expect the 1st project to be a collaborative text editor. Can’t wait to see how that plays out.
On that note, I wish the GNOME Circle app "Secrets" had local-first sync abilities 👀 Maybe I can finally take on a lil FOSS challenge.
@tbernard would be kinda fun to add local multi-cursor
as in
multi-seat compostior → each wl_seat gets its own focus and cursor in the app :D
@kitcatlove @tbernard @PrototypeFund No this aims more on "more sessions" simultaneously to exist next to each other and share the state.
Simple example Google docs without storing the docs in the central service.
@kitcatlove @tbernard @PrototypeFund I think it is out of scope of this particular solution.
Check the https://p2panda.org/ website. ☺️
The g is for GTK, as everybody did back then.
sobby is a server only version. You could run sobby on a box that you didn’t turn off at night (e.g. a VPS) and people would connect to it from gobby, or you could start a server right from your own gobby. Later they spun off libinfinity so that other apps could use the same protocol and be collaborative (i.e. gedit could have added the feature). Not sure whether there were actual consumers of that lib.
@tbernard @afranke the big (maybe only) upside of having it in the web is that i can share notes to literally everybody, no matter if its a phone, a desktop, windows/macos/android.
and also "opening a link" is easier than "install this app" -> "open the link/enter pin/whatever"
i'll likely continue to use hedgedoc or whatever web-based, just so the one i'm sharing it with has as little as possible work to view/edit my docs.
@tbernard @PrototypeFund very cool work! Design question: when and how does it make sense to add this to existing apps?
For example: it would be cool to have collaboration in Papers to read and annotate lecture notes together in realtime. But maybe this use case is too specific for Papers itself and warrants a separate app? But in that case, it would be quite bad having to fork or reimplement the entire Papers just to add this collaboration feature on top?
@YaLTeR Good question! I'd say at this stage of maturity it makes more sense to do this in individual third party apps where it's self-contained and can be iterated on easily - longer-term we do want something like a system-level sync API apps can just use, and at that point I'd imagine we would support it in many core apps as well.
Lots of open questions though, e.g. identity, threat models, where does data/metadata live, where do CRDTs live, how high/low level are the APIs, etc.
@YaLTeR For example, depending on the identity system the potential collaboration workflows would look very different.
e.g. could have fancy Nextcloud-style groups and shared folders for collaboration/permissions, or could keep it super simple, e.g. the pseudonymous identity thing in Reflection.
Also, for anything operating on user files we need to take into account edge cases like external apps changing it from under us etc.
@YaLTeR But if we figure all that out I could see there being a system service that handles all the networking, discovery etc. (managed via a quick settings menu?) and a client library that makes it easy to work with CRDTs and comes with the basic UI for displaying peers and sync status in apps.
Airdrop is probably an interesting example to look at in terms of UI and workflows.
Tobias Bernard
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