This loads faster than native apps serving local content on my device.

For me, it took an estimated 3-5s to load on first visit. Fast, but not "faster than native apps"

The second time round it loaded almost instantly.

I'm guessing there's some caching going on.

IIRC, the D forum also offers direct NNTP access. Would be interesting to compare web access with e.g. tin on a variety of devices…

What a refreshing experience.

Ironically the modern web, built by programmers, is scorned by programmers. You all collectively, persistently, shamelessly decided AngularReactNodeWebpackViteBloat 200mb asynchronous hellspawn websites needed to be made this way.

When all this time, lightweight CSS and anchor links and some PHP was all we needed.

*built by techbros

Or HN. All that talk about "brutalist web design" yet most websites are more bloated than ever...

'Brutalist web design' is a pretty small niche though, no? It's the kind of thing Hacker News readers will have heard of, but I don't think it was ever close to mainstream.

How crude. I can’t even post gifs. This is basically a glorified e-mail client, but with extra steps. No social media integration? What is this 2004? It’s not even decentralized like matrix.

Can’t even post inline videos, bro.

\s

Jokes aside, I do miss this type of interaction. Especially for open source projects. It made finding solutions to common issues much easier when documentation was lacking or has not been updated in a long time.

Now all or most projects have adopted some form of: discord channel, slack group, subreddit, twitter. I remember searching for my similar issue in a slack channel only to realize the chat history has been limited because the owners did not pay the extra amount to archive messages beyond what was given for free.