Back in the days of dial-up BBSs and Internet via a real modem, speed and availability constraints led to apps that work well offline.
Now that most people have unlimited broadband, offline tools have become rare. Now we are trapped in an infrastructure that constrains us to having internet at all times which is then reinforced by the Tyranny of Convenience.
So when someone makes the point “boycott Time Warner/Spectrum because they support right-wing politics and assault privacy”, ppl are helpless… unable to stomach the idea of being offline. It’s like no one has the constitution to say “fuck this shit”.
The web has become such garbage that I am happy to be offline. Shitty ISPs don’t get a dime from me. No more paying for something that is infested with surveillance advertising, CAPTCHA, and garbage. I’m content to periodically login from public hotspots.
But not a single lemmy client for offline use… to sync when plugged in and then read and compose replies later. This would give a better workflow even if always online because you would have a local copy (useful when servers bail out out of the pure fucking blue).
The hecklers will say “what are you waiting for… write it yourself!” As if 1 person can recreate a whole infrastructure (lemmy, kbin, mastodon, xmpp, scraper bots, etc). The heart of the issue is it’s a paradigm that’s being overlooked. If you are going to create an app for whatever reason, why not design it at the ground level to work offline and headless? Of course it would also work online and a GUI can be a separate module. But the reverse is not true… design an app to expect always-available internet and you have something that cannot easily adapt to an offline workflow.
You just wrote your response using an app that’s dysfunctional offline. You had to be online.
Perhaps before your time, Usenet was the way to do forums. Gnus (an emacs mode) was good for this. Gnus would fetch everything to my specification and store a local copy. It served as an offline newsreader. I could search my local archive of messages and the search was not constrained to a specific tool (e.g. grep would work, but gnus was better). I could configure it to grab all headers for new msgs in a particular newsgroup, or full payloads. Then when disconnected it was possible to read posts. I never tested replies because I had other complexities in play (mixmaster), but it was likely possible to compose a reply and sync/upload it later when online. The UX was similar to how mailing lists work.
None of that is possible with Lemmy. It’s theoretically possible given the API, but the tools don’t exist for that.
Offline workflows were designed to accommodate WAN access interruptions, but an unforeseen benefit was control. Having your own copy naturally gives you a bit of control and censorship resilience.
(update) Makes no sense that I have to be online to read something I previously wrote. I sometimes post some useful bit of information but there are only so many notes I can keep organised. Then I later need to recall (e.g. what was that legal statute that I cited for situation X?) If I wrote it into a Lemmy post, I have to be online to find it again. The search tool might be too limited to search the way I need to… and that assumes the host I wrote it on is even still online.
Oh fuck. I remember those crazy early days of e-mail when we were synchronizing with a server with some UUCP shit. We stop using it that way for a reason.
But still, you can download an archive of your correspondence and grep it until you [whatever you want with a pile of a junk mails]