This question came to me while thinking about local-first:
What tools would you use & what sites would you visit, if you had to store all their data locally? How would it change the way you use them?
I want to make it clear that this is not what local-first is about. It’s just a fun little thought that I had. And here’s a couple tools & sites I thought about in this context:
Imagine your e-mail inbox and archive. How much data is there? Would you keep all those gigabytes of e-mails on your computer?
Maybe your inbox is neatly pruned and you don’t keep anything excessive. I try to do that. And I still have almost 2 GBs of e-mails in my archive.
More likely, your inbox is a mess of thousands of unopened e-mails. Will you ever read them? Do you need to keep them?
For people who self-host, this isn’t a rhetorical question. I hope you keep your inboxes clean…
Pick your social site of choice. Think of all the data that is there & how much gets added every minute. Would you download it all?
Now take your feed. Take just the profiles you follow. Would you download and store it all on your phone? Every single post, comment, TikTok, story, reel…
Which ones would you discard? Which ones would you keep?
Yes, really. Imagine taking everything on there & storing it on your phone/laptop/whatever.
There’s a wealth of knowledge there. It’s always kept up to date. Is it worth the space?
You know the drill. Storing all the data is out of the question.
How about the people you subscribe to? Would you let the system download every new video from them by itself to your device?
What about the videos that get recommended to you? How much would you keep?
Would you click on that 4-6 hour video essay if you had to wait for it to download first?
The same question one last time. The map of the whole world. The data about every road & street, about all the places you can visit.
Would you keep it all? If not, how much would you keep? How much do you need?
Yes, it’s not always practical or wise to do things this way.
Yes, you could optimize and make it work better, only store your part of the data locally and keep a copy on the server, etc.
Yes, it could be interesting to try that anyway to see if we can come up with something better.
But that’s not the point here. The point is to think about how much data we go through & process every day. And whether we would do it, if there would be a storage cost associated with that.
Because there is and you are. Storing everything in memory.
Just not on your computer…
Of course there’s also the very real & concrete aspect to this:
All that data is stored somewhere.
And, if I may stumble into permacomputing for a bit - How much of that data is actually worth that storage space?
Was this note worth keeping in memory? If you think so, there’s more here.