Back in the days of dial-up BBSs and Internet via a real modem, speed and availability constraints led to apps that work well offline.
Now that most people have unlimited broadband, offline tools have become rare. Now we are trapped in an infrastructure that constrains us to having internet at all times which is then reinforced by the Tyranny of Convenience.
So when someone makes the point “boycott Time Warner/Spectrum because they support right-wing politics and assault privacy”, ppl are helpless… unable to stomach the idea of being offline. It’s like no one has the constitution to say “fuck this shit”.
The web has become such garbage that I am happy to be offline. Shitty ISPs don’t get a dime from me. No more paying for something that is infested with surveillance advertising, CAPTCHA, and garbage. I’m content to periodically login from public hotspots.
But not a single lemmy client for offline use… to sync when plugged in and then read and compose replies later. This would give a better workflow even if always online because you would have a local copy (useful when servers bail out out of the pure fucking blue).
The hecklers will say “what are you waiting for… write it yourself!” As if 1 person can recreate a whole infrastructure (lemmy, kbin, mastodon, xmpp, scraper bots, etc). The heart of the issue is it’s a paradigm that’s being overlooked. If you are going to create an app for whatever reason, why not design it at the ground level to work offline and headless? Of course it would also work online and a GUI can be a separate module. But the reverse is not true… design an app to expect always-available internet and you have something that cannot easily adapt to an offline workflow.
I hate online tools when they could be offline. But I never thought of building offline versions of online services that synchronise when they can. This is definitely something I will be thinking about when building future projects.
The design approach would also help serve people in impoverished areas, where you might imagine they have no internet access at home but can still participate through some community access point.
most of my work is done with offline tools; i, too, hate online ones. is there a specific market or set of tools where you are running into this issue? i love my offline tools (both the ones i made and thise made by others)
I have nothing for these use cases, off the top of my head:
- Lemmy
- kbin
- Mastodon (well, I have Mastodon Archive by Kensenada but it’s only useful for backups and searching, not posting)
- airline, train, and bus routes and fares – this is not just an app non-existence problem since the websites are often bot-hostile. But the idea is that it fucking sucks to have to do the manual labor of using their shitty web GUI app to search for schedules one parameter set at a time. E.g. I want to go from city A to B possibly via city C anytime in the next 6 or 8 weeks, and I want the cheapest. That likely requires me to do 100+ separate searches. When it should just be open data… we fetch a CSV or XML file and study the data offline and do our own queries. For flights Matrix ITA was a great thing (though purely online)… until Google bought it to ruin it.
- Youtube videos – yt-dl and invideous is a shitshow (Google’s fault). YT is designed so you have to be online because of Google’s protectionism. I used to be able to pop into a library and grab ~100 YT videos over Invideous in the time that I could only view a few, and have days of content to absorb offline (and while the library is closed). Google sabotaged that option. But they got away with it because of a lousy culture of novice users willing to be enslaved to someone else’s shitty UIs. There should have been widespread outrage when Google pulled that shit… a backlash that would twist their arm to be less protectionist. But it’s easy to oppress an minority of people.
depending on your area, more and more transit organizations are publishing their routes using General Transit Feed Spec (GTFS). since the routes and schedules don’t change often (a few times a year at most) you can grab the archive and do your route planning offline. Im not sure about any apps that do long distance multimodal planning, or airlines that publish those datasets, but my homeassistant instance shows me next scheduled times for nearby bus and metro stops completely offline using the dataset. there are tools for completely offline transit routing, too.
oooohhhhh, i think i misunderstood. i was thinking about apps that dont use online services - using desktop native apps to interact with available api’s is an understandable request; however, getting access to some api’s can be a bit tricky for these processes.
you are right that a lot of these are custom-built for a single purpose for the person that built them (moderating, bot use, etc.)… probably because most tools for general use wont be built unless a person that builds tools has a major problem with it (a.k.a. if it aint broke dont fix it). :(
Indeed, I really meant tools that have some cloud interaction but give us asynchronous autonomy from the cloud.
Of course there are also scenarios that normally use the could but can be made fully offline. E.g. Argos Translate. If you use a web-based translator like Google Translate or Yandex Translate, you are not only exposed to the dependency of having a WAN when you need to translate, but you give up privacy. Argos Translate empowers you to translate text without cloud dependency while also getting sensible level of privacy. Or in the case of Google Maps vs. OSMand, you have the privacy of not sharing your location and also the robustness of not being dependant on a functioning uplink.
Both scenarios (fully offline apps and periodic syncing of msgs) are about power and control. If all your content is sitting on someone else’s server, you are disempowered because they can boot you at any moment, alter your content, or they can pull the plug on their server spontaneously without warning (this has happened to me many times). They can limit your searching capability too. A natural artifact of offline consumption is that you have your own copy of the data.
if it aint broke dont fix it
It’s broke from where I’m sitting. Many times Mastodon and Lemmy servers went offline out of the pure blue and all my msgs were mostly gone, apart from what got cached on other hosts which is tedious and non-trivial to track down. It’s technically broken security in the form of data loss/loss of availability.
I don’t know what are you talking about. I can’t even imagine any “online tools”.
What tools have become mostly online?
Forums? They are online for a reason and because of their very essence.
What else? Mail? Same as forums.
Give me an example.You just wrote your response using an app that’s dysfunctional offline. You had to be online.
Perhaps before your time, Usenet was the way to do forums. Gnus (an emacs mode) was good for this. Gnus would fetch everything to my specification and store a local copy. It served as an offline newsreader. I could search my local archive of messages and the search was not constrained to a specific tool (e.g. grep would work, but gnus was better). I could configure it to grab all headers for new msgs in a particular newsgroup, or full payloads. Then when disconnected it was possible to read posts. I never tested replies because I had other complexities in play (mixmaster), but it was likely possible to compose a reply and sync/upload it later when online. The UX was similar to how mailing lists work.
None of that is possible with Lemmy. It’s theoretically possible given the API, but the tools don’t exist for that.
Offline workflows were designed to accommodate WAN access interruptions, but an unforeseen benefit was control. Having your own copy naturally gives you a bit of control and censorship resilience.
(update) Makes no sense that I have to be online to read something I previously wrote. I sometimes post some useful bit of information but there are only so many notes I can keep organised. Then I later need to recall (e.g. what was that legal statute that I cited for situation X?) If I wrote it into a Lemmy post, I have to be online to find it again. The search tool might be too limited to search the way I need to… and that assumes the host I wrote it on is even still online.
Oh fuck. I remember those crazy early days of e-mail when we were synchronizing with a server with some UUCP shit. We stop using it that way for a reason.
But still, you can download an archive of your correspondence and grep it until you [whatever you want with a pile of a junk mails]
