Keynote: Byzantine Eventual Consistency for Reliable Local-first Software

A talk at 45th International Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems (SRDS), Rome, Italy, 24 Sep 2026

Abstract

Local-first software, a growing industry movement, aims to make collaborative applications (such as text and graphics editors, spreadsheets, etc.) resilient against server failure by making the client software on the end user’s device a full replica of the application state, and allowing it to sync with other replicas in a decentralised fashion. This has many advantages, but also introduces new challenges, since the system can no longer rely on a central server to maintain the consistency and security of the collaborative document, and practical systems have to tolerate potentially malicious clients. This talk gives an overview of our work on Byzantine Eventual Consistency, and how the open source Automerge library makes this approach efficient.