There's a persistent myth in software that local-first means 'offline mode' — a degraded experience you tolerate until the cloud comes back. That's not what local-first means to us.
Local-first means your data lives on your machine as the source of truth. Not a cache. Not a sync buffer. The real thing. When you write a page in yoinko, it goes straight into a SQLite database on your disk. There's no sync queue, no eventual consistency, no conflict resolution. It's just... saved.
This has real consequences. Your notes load instantly — no network round-trip. You can work on a plane, in a café with bad wifi, or in a bunker. You can back up your data by copying a folder. You can migrate by moving a file.
But what about collaboration? What about access from multiple devices? These are real needs, and we're not ignoring them. Yoinko Cloud handles multi-device access. GitHub sync (coming soon) handles version history. But the local copy is always the authority.
The cloud is a feature, not a requirement. That's the difference.
We think the industry overcorrected toward cloud-only. SaaS is great for many things, but your personal knowledge base — the place where you think, plan, and write — should be yours. Not rented. Not held hostage by a subscription. Not dependent on a server you don't control.
Local-first is not a compromise. It's a choice. And we think it's the right one.