There is now a great annual Local-first Software conference in Berlin (https://www.localfirstconf.com/) organised by Ink and Switch, and it's spawned a spin out Sync Conf this November in SF (https://syncconf.dev/)

There was a great panel discussion this year from a number of the co-authors of the the paper linked, discussing what is Local-first software in the context of dev tools and what they have learnt since the original paper. It's very much worth watching: https://youtu.be/86NmEerklTs?si=Kodd7kD39337CTbf

The community are very much settling on "Sync" being a component of local first, but applicable so much wider. Along with local first software being a characteristic of end user software, with dev tools - such as sync engines - being an enabling tool but not "local first" in as much themselves.

The full set of talks from the last couple of years are online here: https://youtube.com/@localfirstconf?si=uHHi5Tsy60ewhQTQ

It's an exciting time for the local-first / sync engine community, we've been working on tools that enable realtime collaborative and async collaborative experiences, and now with the onset of AI the market for this is exploring. Every AI app is inherently multi user collaborative with the agents as actors within the system. This requires the tech that the sync engine community has been working on.