What if we had local-first software?

An interesting thought exercise. What if the Internet had never become a giant vacuum for malevolent ad agencies and desktops hadn't become stupidly over provisioned thin clients for web pages? Instead, what if the Internet was only used to facilitate data synchronization between endpoints? Could we get there from our current place?

Let's ask ourselves: what if the Internet was offline first? And what if we had local-first software paving the way into an offline SaaS model?" Actually, the authors of this paper (Local-First Software: You Own Your Data, in spite of the Cloud") raise these exact same questions in their work, and it'll be our matter at hand today. How would an offline-first Internet look like?