Offline is just online with extreme latency
FTA:<p>&gt; Unfortunately, some of the open technologies for building more local-first, p2p applications just aren’t there yet. Like Peter’s point on webRTC.<p>I guffawed at this. I mean, seriously. In the days before the internet was widespread, like mid-90s, there were actually multi-player games that worked over LANs, both IP and IPX. Somehow, people were able to configure multiple computers to talk to each other with this funny numbers called &quot;addresses&quot; or something. DNS existed of course, but you could also add to &#x2F;etc&#x2F;hosts, Novell had a thing, everyone had a thing.<p>The problem is that somewhere around the mid 2000s or early 2010s we <i>forgot</i> that anything networking-related could be based around non-web protocols and stacks. What a disservice we&#x27;ve done ourselves.<p>Not that I&#x27;m advocating people type in IP addresses or have to set up their own DNS servers or admin their own LANs, but wow, it&#x27;s like part of our collective brains is just missing.