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I have had some very nice experiences with the app router, but I see what you mean.

I still hope they will get their act together in the latest releases, after all server components were a huge shift with a lot of rough edges to figure out.

A lot of what Next does/did _is_ leaning into web’s strengths. It was Next that made me declare image size beforehand, for example, drastically reducing layout jumps. It also made image optimization almost effortless, greatly improving load times for my websites. The web as a platform is a nice concept I would love to adopt more, but then I need to write some server-side code and I am completely on my own. Pushing the DX around the client/server boundary is one of the things that made Next great for me.

One of the things I liked about Next is that it presented a “unified platform” instead of the fragmented sea of hacks that is web development. Eg. I was initially taken aback by having to use a special component for images but then it made sense when I realized the platform handles image optimization and stuff like that for me.

But over time I lost the ability to reason about my Next code almost completely. Sometimes it’s the caching, sometimes it’s some little arcane code differences that turn my route into an unexpected type. There is some logic behind it, I can respect that, but I no longer have a coherent mental model of what the framework / the platform does.

It feels like the reality that the abstractions are trying to cover is too wild not to break through at places. Which, I guess, is just web. But it’s a pity, it felt good to have a saner, simpler platform to develop for in older versions of Next.

Is this irony? Judging by https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/crime-rate-... it’s not true.

This is Mastodon, and there are instances such as https://ec.social-network.europa.eu.

But it’s true in the general idea of Bluesky being highly centralized and dependent on a single for-profit entity.

Catching bugs in CI is orders of magnitude slower and more expensive than catching them as type errors while writing the code.

Static type checking greatly affects code design. That’s why converting from JS to TS doesn’t give you full benefits of the type system – the code doesn’t lean into types to model invariants.

For me the problem wasn’t the cultural change, it was depending on language whose leadership doesn’t seem to give a fuck about real-world problems the language users face in production. And then being constantly gaslighted about it on the official channels like the language forum.

They did the best for society, not for their child. Yes, vaccines are the best choice, there is no doubt about that. But the society in question must take much better care of those who sacrifice so much for the whole.

As a programmer, I don’t feel threatened by the technology itself, but I do feel threatened by the second-degree effects such as what the technology does to our field, especially in the wrong hands.

This! There is a “Bluesky outage”. There is no “Mastodon outage”.

I think we are all saying that Mastodon is meaningfully decentralized and there is no single party that could pull the rug from beneath the whole network. This is what instances bring to the table. Bluesky may be architecturally beautiful, but it’s not decentralized in practice. (See https://arewedecentralizedyet.online for example.) And we know what tends to happen to important centralized services.

New services don’t start with the same userbase because users don’t use protocols, they use apps. And for Bluesky that’s predominantly a single centralized app. If that demotes content from the “competitors” or even switches the protocol completely, you are stuffed. The apps are very much not equal.

On the other hand, the currently overwhelmingly dominant Bluesky app and infrastructure can control what users see, presenting a centralized chokepoint. It’s nice to own your data but if your social circle uses a single centralized app to view it, shrug.

Any instance will work I think, just start following someone like https://eupolicy.social/@bert_hubert and you should discover relevant people and hashtags soon enough.

Mastodon works fairly well for that I think.

Very nice developer experience. A lot of batteries included, like CDN, incremental page regeneration, image pipeline or observability. Not having to maintain a server.

I’m still planning to move elsewhere though, the vendor lock-in is not worth it and I’d like to keep our infra in the EU.

“The vision was always compelling. A social web that no single company controls, where users own their identity and their relationships,” says the new CEO of the single company that can control what millions of Bluesky users see in their apps.

Well, right now a foreign government can do that to us, so shifting the risk to our own politicians would be an improvement.

Is there or do you plan to add some kind of webhook to notify interested parties that a vault has changed? I think it would go together nicely with the headless sync.

Yes, you can add an enormous amount of complexity to your app in 3 clicks. Should you? The proverbial night crashes are, in my experience, often much better problem to have than the complexity and cost of AWS.

My argument works just as well if you replace “perfecting” with “improving”.

Would you keep fixing the underlined spelling mistakes on your “watch out for holes in the pavement” sign while people are already walking there?

I would even say that from a project management perspective, zero technical debt is undesirable. It means you have invested resources into perfecting something that, almost by definition, could have waited a while, instead of improving some more important metric such as user experience. (I do understand tech debt makes it harder to work with the codebase, impacting all metrics, I just don’t think zero tech debt is a good target.)

Solar power is very cheap and still getting cheaper:

https://www.statista.com/chart/35117/levelized-cost-of-energ...

In what way is Mastodon a failed experiment? Low number of active users or something else?

Believe it or not, many people just don’t care about the stock market. But they may still care about the economy that could crash badly if the AI bubble gets too big before it pops.

Oh yes. As opposed to the “kiss the ring or else” market freedoms of the US.