Local-First: Keep Working When the Cloud Doesn’t

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TEC364: A bed that needs Amazon’s permission to cool down is a design choice. When the AWS us-east-1 region failed on October 20, 2025, Eight Sleep owners woke up stuck at odd angles and automated litter boxes stopped cleaning. That outage is the starting point for a look at local-first software: programs that keep your data on your own disk and your own network, with the cloud as an extra rather than a requirement.

Dom Bettinelli, Thomas Sanjurjo, and Leo Devick start from the 2019 Ink & Switch essay “Local-first software: You own your data, in spite of the cloud” and apply two tests. The outage test asks what you can still open if you unplug your router for a day. The shutdown test asks what you still have if the company folds or kills the product.

They take those tests through notes apps, where Dom explains why he left Evernote for Obsidian‘s plain text files; ebooks, where Amazon’s removal of Kindle downloads pushed him to Kobo and Calibre; and media you thought you bought, from Ubisoft’s always-online The Crew to California’s new rules on calling a license a purchase. The panel compares self-hosted servers like Jellyfin, Plex and Kavita, and admits the trade-off: when you stop renting, you take on the maintenance.

Office documents, photos, smart homes and passwords get the same treatment. Microsoft 365 goes read-only after 30 days offline, and Google Docs works offline only if you set it up first. Dom’s last Belkin Wemo outlet stopped working the day of the recording. Thomas makes the case for KeePassXC on a USB drive, and everyone agrees that keeping your own data means keeping your own backups. The segment closes with a short checklist you can try this week, and Dom calls wasteful planned obsolescence what it is: bad stewardship.

In the headlines, Pope Leo XIV says there is an ontological difference between human art and what a machine generates. Dom and the panel weigh where AI tools fit in creative work and where they don’t.

For picks, Leo recommends the PICO-8 fantasy console, Thomas points to the report on the OpenAI agents that broke into Hugging Face, and Dom makes the case for the ThermoWorks Gravitas precision kitchen scale.

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Disclaimer: Hosts, panelists, and guests may have a financial interest in the companies discussed through investments or other means. Their opinions and recommendations are not affected and do not present a conflict of interest. We offer this statement in the interest of full disclosure.

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