Local-first software begins from a tension: cloud collaboration improved shared work while weakening ownership, durability, and offline use. Its seven ideals define the desired operating conditions, and CRDTs offer one route to concurrent editing without a server choosing a winner. For Open Epistemic Intelligence, this is a design standard rather than proof of completion; such architectures should be judged by how much local control and survivable shared state they actually preserve.
Cloud apps gave people collaboration and took away ownership. The files live on someone else's server, the software stops working when the company does, and the network is on the critical path of every keystroke.
The paper sets out seven ideals for getting the collaboration without the trade: fast, works on several devices, works offline, collaborative, outlives the vendor, private, and under the user's control.
CRDTs are the technology that makes it reachable, by letting two copies of a document be edited concurrently and merged without a server deciding who won. The authors score existing approaches against the seven and find most of them short.