Local-first sounds great until you need your notes on another device

Your notes are on your laptop. Your laptop is at home. You need the notes now. Local-first has an accessibility problem that its advocates don't talk about enough.

Local-first is a legitimate philosophy with real advantages. Your data lives on your device. You own it completely. There's no server dependency. Performance is excellent because everything is read from local disk. For people who value data sovereignty and primarily work from one device, the appeal is obvious.

The problems emerge when your life involves more than one device, which for most people is every day.

You took notes on your laptop at home. You're now at a cafe with your iPad and need to reference them. With a local-first tool and no sync, your notes are on your laptop and your laptop is at home. The notes might as well not exist.

The standard response is "set up sync." But sync introduces the exact complexities that local-first was supposed to avoid. iCloud sync has known conflict issues with Obsidian vaults. Dropbox sync can corrupt files through premature sync of partially written files. Git sync requires technical knowledge that most people don't have and doesn't work well on mobile. Obsidian Sync ($8/month) works but is a cloud service, which means your local-first tool now depends on a cloud service, which is what local-first was supposed to eliminate.

Each sync solution adds a dependency. Each dependency can fail. And when sync fails, the result is often worse than not having the notes: it's conflicting versions of the notes where you're not sure which one is current.

The middle path: own your data, access it everywhere

The ideal isn't local-first (own your data, limited access) or cloud-first (universal access, someone else owns your data). It's owned data with universal access.

Fabric provides this through bring-your-own-storage. Your data is stored in your cloud storage account (S3, R2), encrypted with your keys. It's not on Fabric's servers. It's not on one device. It's in infrastructure you control, accessible from every device through desktop, mobile, and web apps.

You get the ownership guarantee of local-first (your data, your infrastructure, your keys) without the accessibility limitation (one device, sync workarounds, conflict risks). The data is truly yours and available wherever you are.

Frequently asked questions

Doesn't cloud storage introduce the same dependency as any cloud service? The dependency is on commodity infrastructure (S3, R2) rather than on a specific application. If Fabric disappeared, your data would be in your S3 bucket in standard formats. If Obsidian disappeared, your local vault would still be on your laptop. The difference is that with bring-your-own-storage, your data is accessible from anywhere rather than from one device.

Is local-first better for privacy? For privacy from cloud providers, yes. For practical data ownership, bring-your-own-storage provides equivalent privacy (your data is encrypted in your infrastructure) with universal access. The privacy advantage of local-first is real but comes at the cost of accessibility and the complexity of sync.

What about Obsidian Sync? Doesn't that solve the access problem? Obsidian Sync works but is a paid cloud service, which means your "local-first" tool now depends on Obsidian's servers for sync. If the appeal of local-first is independence from cloud services, Obsidian Sync partially undermines that appeal.

Can I use local-first tools for some things and Fabric for others? Yes. Some people use Obsidian for deep, focused writing on their primary device and Fabric for everything that needs to be accessible across devices: meeting notes, reference material, web clips, voice memos.

How does bring-your-own-storage work technically? Fabric reads from and writes to your designated cloud storage bucket (Amazon S3, Cloudflare R2). The data is encrypted in transit and at rest. Fabric's servers process the data for search and AI but don't retain it. If you revoke Fabric's access, your data remains in your bucket unchanged.

What if I'm in a location without internet? Fabric's apps cache content locally for browsing, but full functionality requires an internet connection. For extended periods without internet, local-first tools have an advantage. For the typical pattern (mostly connected, occasionally not), the trade-off favours universal access.

Is bring-your-own-storage expensive? S3 and R2 storage costs are very low for personal use (pennies per GB per month). For a typical knowledge library, the storage cost is negligible compared to any application subscription.

What about the performance advantage of local-first? Local-first tools read from disk, which is fast. Cloud-based tools depend on network speed. In practice, modern CDN-backed applications load quickly enough that the performance difference is imperceptible for most users. The search speed is comparable because semantic search requires computation that's faster in the cloud regardless.

Related reading: Obsidian is not for everyone, Where does your knowledge live?, Own your data, own your AI, The plugin problem. Related pages: Private and secure, Desktop app, Mobile app.