Last month, 400 people attended the third edition of Local-First Conf in Berlin. As a conference organizer, I helped define the event’s theme on user empowerment in computing. But what surprised me were some emergent themes: a political angle, and the charged and divergent emotional response to how LLMs are changing our industry.
On politics
The last year of unpredictable geopolitics has elevated a discussion on digital sovereignty, especially here in the European Union and in Germany. Local-first software has something to offer on this, since our value of “data ownership” — traditionally about the individual — can also apply at a company, nation, or society level.
Martin Kleppmann’s opening talk captures this well:
He highlights that uncertainty in the relationship between the EU and its formerly most-trusted partner (the US) has created awareness that software infrastructure is concentrated in a small number of US companies. Losing access to everything from email to calendar to inference to general-purpose cloud hosting could be catastrophic for a nation.
Local-first software is about data ownership, which is part of the individual-scale version of digital sovereignty. But our ideals and technology could be scaled up to a national level to meet this current need. Technologies from our community — CRDTs, sync engines, universal version control, and good old-fashioned open protocols and file formats — can give a nation more independence and control over its own critical software infrastructure.
On AI
Gathering together in person, it became clear that we have a wide spectrum of emotions on how LLM-assisted coding is rapidly changing the craft of software engineering and design.
Some are energized by the possibilities of software becoming faster and cheaper to create. Others are dismayed at the collapse of craft and intention in software engineering and design. Many people are feeling both things simultaneously, or a host of other strong yet hard-to-describe emotions.
Some speakers addressed this head-on. For example how we as individuals can take more control and ownership while using AI, with on-device models or open source, hackable agent frameworks.
But as Scott Jenson so aptly put in his talk on evolving desktop UX, “I’m not against AI. It’s just sucking up all the oxygen in the room. Can we talk about something else for a little bit?”
And more
Other highlights for me included:
- Why email is the first and still one of the best local-first technologies
- A serious business use case in factory automation
- ATproto which is experiencing a real groundswell at the moment, with talks from Bluesky’s CTO and ATproto as a solution to long-term sync server maintenance
- A community success story in Iroh, who have cracked p2p networking and are in the midst of a growth boom with their 1.0 release
The quality bar for talks was extremely high this year. I take some credit for that in organizing our CFP selection process, but more importantly it seems that everyone speaking took the assignment seriously and delivered a high-signal talk.
Conclusion
2026 was the biggest yet in terms of number of attendees and talks. But it also felt to me like a year the community came into its own. We’re more than CRDTs, more than sync engines, and even more than the seven ideals from the 2019 essay.
Instead, we recognized that we have something to offer the world: technology and principles to guide digital sovereignty. And something to offer each other: a place to share our mixed feelings about how our craft is changing. And as before, the conference is a place to meet people with shared values even cutting across the usual silos of academia, startups, and mainstream development culture.
This is a community that is passionate about the good technology can do in the world. But we’re also cautious about the way technology can be misused in disempowering or harmful ways. We acknowledge that mainstream software will largely be the creation of big tech companies, and that’s ok. But there still needs to be a place in the world where software creation can be less homogeneous, more weird, more human, and more fun.
It’s been a privilege to both help create this community and to be a part of it. A wrap-up including all talk recordings is here. I’m looking forward to seeing everyone again in 2027.