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I can second this. We were evaluating moving off Heroku and to Fly.io, but we didn't need all of the edge compute stuff. We just want a better Heroku without having to think about infrastructure and having to think about edge compute just got in our way. I feel like Next.js is in a similar position. While their main vision is SSR, I wonder if they are missing out on a chunk of the market that simply doesn't want to t…
One of the key design choices of Next.js was to enable granularity on the runtime (Node.js or Edge[1]) and the rendering method (static or dynamic[2]) on a per-route basis. If you want a full SSR site, that's okay. If you want a full static site, that's also okay. We often see folks wanting a mix of both. For example, maybe the /about page is static, but the home page is dynamic and personalized based on the visitor.…
I initially fought to get SSR working, fixing hydration errors and making sure our code was isomorphic.
I later realized that I can just use the parts of Next.js we need and turned off SSR. It wasn't a big value add for our particular product.
But doing this wasn't straightforward. I hadn't even realized it was a possibility until I stumbled across a blog post.
I had to copy a NoSSR implementation of the internet. It wasn't just some flag I could toggle for a page.
I've also found myself recommending Next to folks saying "Use Next.js, but btw you don't need use SSR. Make sure the trade-offs make sense."
I'm curious if I'm in the minority of Next.js users. What percentage of them don't need SSR but value everything else?