I’ve been working on a small browser app that is local first and have been trying to figure out how to pair it with static hosting. It feels like this should be possible but so far the tooling all seems stuck in the mindset of having a server somewhere.
My use case is scoring live events that may or may not have Internet connection. So normal usage is a single person but sometimes it would be nice to allow for multi person scoring without relying on centralized infrastructure.
I was in the same boat and I found Nostr is a perfect fit. You can write a 100% client side no-server app and persist your data to relays.
Here's the app I built if you want to try it out: https://github.com/chr15m/watch-later
Honestly, having used InstantDB (one of the providers listed in their post), I think it'd be a pretty nice fit.
I've been writing a budget app for my wife and I and I've made it 100% free with 3rd party hosting:
* InstantDB free tier allows 1 dev. That's the remote sync.
* Netlify for the static hosting
* Free private gitlab ci/cd for running some email notification polling, basically a poor mans hosted cron.
I may end up doing that, but I really wish there was a true p2p option that doesn’t have me relying on someone not rug pulling their free tier sync server.
Yeah... true p2p is pretty hard though, to the point that even stuff like WebRTC requires external servers to setup the data sync portion. It would be nice to develop something that worked at that layer though.
IIUC, InstantDB is open source with a docker container you can run yourself, but at this point it's designed to run in a more cloud-like environment than I'd like. Last time I checked there was at least one open PR to make it easier to run in a different environment, but I haven't check in recently.
I spent some more time hunting due to this conversation and I’m hopeful that yjs + y-WebRTC + PeerJS will solve this. I also see that there are a few libraries that enable QR codes to replace PeerJS as a truly offline WebRTC initialization with true p2p connectivity. Looks quite promising
Unfortunately, p2p is *inhales* fxxxed! due to how modern internet networks are set up. NAT (potentially VPNed at carrier level), lack of IPv6, firewalls blocking incoming traffic, dysfunctioning UPnP, blocked UDP. Next tier issues: legal, that bound user identities to IPs, showing your IP publically is a privacy risk first and a security risk second (DoS).
It seems like it'll be impossible without an overlay network (like Yggdrasil, i2p), but these will be too heavy for mobile devices without a dedicated functioning relay... here we go again.