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I made my first web0 website today. It's so cool it just works

elliott.computer

181–190 of 269 posts

Re: I made my first web0 website today. It's so cool it just works

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JavaScript framework churn (on the frontend) ended 6 years ago. The only thing keeping this meme going is commenters on HN.

What framework did you end with? What state management approach? What styling strategy? I think the churn stops whenever you stop adopting new things to replace functionally equivalent things, but new things still come along and get hyped.

Software engineers that replace things with functionally equivalent things don't get a lot of actual work done and typically aren't employed for very long either. So, the churn had to stop long ago from inside the average high performing company (and professional engineer's mindset). Only when things are really bad (as they were 6 years ago) is it worth rewriting everything. We've done that and it's not happening again. You can follow my work here: react.school

Re: I made my first web0 website today. It's so cool it just works

#182
post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No regular person would ever do any of the things in your alternate universe. Even most tech people wouldn't, because it's a massive pain in the ass. I don't know why you think the world was ever close to this.

Geocities. Tripod.

Geocities was the centralised easy alternative to hosting your own website, that was what made it popular.

Re: I made my first web0 website today. It's so cool it just works

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I 100% agree. Imagine if self-hosting was taught in schools. Would Facebook and GMail be this big? I'm dreaming of an alternate universe where you read your friends microblogs through RSS, with the client and timeline algorithm of your choice. Everyone has his own mail server, with proper open-source spam filters. Open-source is a public service, receiving donations from governments. We were so close to this.

No regular person would ever do any of the things in your alternate universe. Even most tech people wouldn't, because it's a massive pain in the ass. I don't know why you think the world was ever close to this.

Of course there's issues, that's why it didn't happen!

But solutions do exist: open-source focusing on UI, standardisation, free static IPs, more open operating systems, etc

Re: I made my first web0 website today. It's so cool it just works

#184

It's funny that web3 is being sold as the decentralized web when that's what the internet architecture was literally designed for -- to survive an apocalyptic nuclear war. However, big players used their ability to purchase infrastructure and unforeseen flaws in the protocols to centralize much of the activity on the web. Lol if you think money can't do that to any decentralized architecture. One thing that would at…

The web is fairly decentralized though. Google could go down and the web would still operate. Amazon could go down, and the web would still operate. Yes there's a few centralized components still such-as DNS, but even that is heavily cached and distributed in nature. Blockchain could aid in replacing BGP & DNS allowing for a better web. But web3 is just as centralized as our current web, if not more centralized. For…

If AWS went down, some critical infrastructure would definitely be out of commission.

Re: I made my first web0 website today. It's so cool it just works

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I 100% agree. Imagine if self-hosting was taught in schools. Would Facebook and GMail be this big? I'm dreaming of an alternate universe where you read your friends microblogs through RSS, with the client and timeline algorithm of your choice. Everyone has his own mail server, with proper open-source spam filters. Open-source is a public service, receiving donations from governments. We were so close to this.

No regular person would ever do any of the things in your alternate universe. Even most tech people wouldn't, because it's a massive pain in the ass. I don't know why you think the world was ever close to this.

The obvious question is why should these things be a pain in the ass.

Re: I made my first web0 website today. It's so cool it just works

#186
post #94
post #78

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The amount of reinvention in the JS space is mind boggling. While this works to drive the whole thing forward it would be nice to see more LTS support rather than yet another templating library. Not that most their languages are inherently better but some have a way of mitigating the problem slightly, like e.g. python's extensive std lib collection.

I am a backend engineer by trade, and I have been trying to learn me a little React because I decided I should learn new tech (not the stuff I use on a daily basis, which is Python) on side projects. So the backend is being done in Rust, and frontend is using React. I had this moment where I thought "well, I need Typescript, because I want nicely typed interfaces and contracts, and I need React". Turns out it's not e…

Why do you need types to learn React? You really need a compiler to tell you when you have made a mistake that bad?

Your first mistake is trying to add typing on a dynamic language that works just fine without types. You won’t really learn the underlying language that well that way, and you therefore won’t have a good understanding of it.

TypeScript makes sense in large projects, with many developers where you need to catch a class of problems that compile time type checking can catch. It doesn’t offer a lot or add much in the way of actually learning the fundamentals of frontend development and is a distraction when viewed through that lens.

Are you sure you weren’t actually avoiding the scary unknowns of actual learning and doing a bunch of busy work to bring familiarity into an otherwise unfamiliar space? I catch myself doing that a lot, especially if I need to learn a completely new language to learn something. I wasted a lot of time trying to make OpenCV work with native JavaScript when I should have just learned enough C++ to get by.

Re: I made my first web0 website today. It's so cool it just works

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't mean the web isn't decentralized, that means people have gravitated towards a single vendor for reasons I won't get into.

But whatever vendor you choose is a centralized vendor. Unless your using an IP address for you website, your domain name is registered through a centralized registrar. The DNS architecture/protocol itself is centralized as it is controlled by ICANN.

> your domain name is registered through a centralized registrar. The DNS architecture/protocol itself is centralized as it is controlled by ICANN.

There are tons of registrars and DNS is even more decentralized — it’s not like .ru has the same operators as .us or .aws.

The key question is how many parties can limit you. The DNS roots are stable and widely cached, so you don’t have bottlenecks based on those. Once you own a record in your hierarchy of choice, you can do whatever you want with it without needing to involve the roots in any way.

What happens, however, is that people voluntarily share infrastructure because it’s cheaper and easier for them to let Google operate their email, AWS their servers, etc. That’s different in a very key way: if you don’t like how it’s going, you can easily leave at any time. The centralization is weak — lose that competitive edge and the exodus begins.

The same thing has already happened in the blockchain world: theoretically you can be your own bank, IdP, etc. but in practice most people prefer to let other people manage those functions for them. Control of the blockchains, oracles, etc. similarly has a relatively small number of parties involved and it would be harder to change them than updating DNS records.

Re: I made my first web0 website today. It's so cool it just works

#188
post #70

Sorry, but this is a rant. I am deeply saddened by the current state of affairs in the web today. in Javascript right now there are so many layers upon layers upon layers of DSLs and mannerisms on top of questionable language features which 'must be used' because the former language features are not cool anymore since a few days ago. The whole ecosystem is turning into a meme of itself. In a few months someone will r…

Just don't switch to those new shiny useless/bad frameworks?

Or do you mean that you have to suffer like when you visit websites, like cnn.com: https://i.imgur.com/VAZMUx8.png

Re: I made my first web0 website today. It's so cool it just works

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No regular person would ever do any of the things in your alternate universe. Even most tech people wouldn't, because it's a massive pain in the ass. I don't know why you think the world was ever close to this.

Of course there's issues, that's why it didn't happen! But solutions do exist: open-source focusing on UI, standardisation, free static IPs, more open operating systems, etc

You're completely misunderstanding what I'm saying. The people/product problems are far larger than the technical problems.

Why would people ever want to manage all of those things? A large part of the value proposition of Gmail and Facebook is that they are easy to use.

Also, this: https://twitter.com/nikitabier/status/1369098642171162625

Re: I made my first web0 website today. It's so cool it just works

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re forgetting that it also has hoards of naysayers clamoring to be the loudest to say “it will never work”. So, at least in that limited sense, it very much feels revolutionary.

Sure but you’ll have folks doing that whether an idea is brilliant or utterly idiotic. That in and of itself doesn’t really mean anything other than the idea is polarizing.

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