Watchlists

Local-first data

Projects that let an application hold its own data and still sync — CRDTs, embedded stores, and replication that does not require a service in the middle. The spine of the sovereignty thesis: if the data cannot leave the provider, nothing else about portability matters.

5 projects, in the order the list declares.

yjs/yjs22.4k

Why it is here — The CRDT most other collaborative editors build on. Its ubiquity is the point: a shared substrate is harder to withdraw than a product.

Growth
2/14
Last commit
12d ago
Last release
14d ago
License
non-standard

Why it is here — A newer CRDT engine with a rich-text focus. Worth watching for whether it converges with yjs or fragments the space.

Growth
2/14
Last commit
7d ago
Last release
8d ago
License
MIT

Why it is here — Replication as the primary feature rather than an add-on, with pluggable backends.

Growth
2/14
Last commit
yesterday
Last release
36d ago
License
Apache-2.0

Why it is here — Small enough to read end to end, which makes it a useful reference for what local-first actually requires.

Growth
2/14
Last commit
3d ago
Last release
3d ago
License
MIT

Why it is here — A product rather than a library — the test of whether local-first survives contact with real users.

Growth
2/14
Last commit
yesterday
Last release
5d ago
License
non-standard

Membership and order are curated in radar-watchlists.json. Metrics come from the radar’s own measurements — growth is sampled daily from GitHub’s star counts, and maintenance is read when this page is built. A metric with nothing behind it reads unknown rather than zero.