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We Need To Talk About Vercel

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Re: We Need To Talk About Vercel

#111

Post by scrollaway »

leerob wrote: post #30
flimsypremise wrote: post #28

My sense of Vercel (mostly from working with NextJS) is that they are more interested in appearing to support an open source framework while making their product as difficult to interoperate with other technologies as possible in an attempt to lock users into their platform and hopefully pay for it.

Hey, I'm on the team at Vercel. What could we do better? Open to your feedback. Our platform integrates with 30+ frameworks ( https://vercel.com/docs/frameworks ), we directly fund the development of Next.js and Svelte, and we sponsor Nuxt, Astro, Solid, and more.

If you want to call yourself open, you can start by making the development more open. Right now it’s almost all behind closed doors until it hits a PR, and once in a while the Vercel gods are feeling generous enough to share some slightly early plans in a discussion somewhere.

Simply “here’s what we have in mind for next release”. An open framework should not be developed like you folks do it. Look at how Python or Django develop their releases for better examples.

You have RFCs, but most of them are internal and don’t reach the public space. Why?

AppDir is a good example. Yeah you have an extremely high level table of what’s planned vs in progress but there’s nowhere public where these discussions are being held. We’re not able to see nor contribute to the decisions. We’re not able to chime in when bad decisions are obviously being taken. Some companies view this as an asset because they want the power to silently take decisions that are good for them but bad for their users.

Re: We Need To Talk About Vercel

#112

Post by llambda »

theobr wrote: post #55
llambda wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually I reached out to you asking for a comment which I could add to the article, not for your technical support. I was surprised and I have to admit a bit dismayed to watch you throw yourself into the fray on a Sunday. The technical issues, which in fact persist, are at this point an aside to the way Vercel has handled this issue.

It’s pretty clear these issues were beyond what traditional support was capable of. If you had reached out to someone like Lee earlier it’s likely your experience would have been much better Vercel’s definitely in a weird place, trying to be the home for innovation while also offering more traditional support. While the support experience you had was less than ideal, you’re also failing to recognize that you are blee…

What a disappointing take.

In fact Lee was looped in six weeks ago; there was an issue with Remix and CDN cache behavior which popped up on GitHub. I mentioned my issues in that thread thinking they were likely related. Lee responded and let me know he would talk to the internal team.[0] However, Lee did nothing that was ever visible to me. Moreover, I completely disagree with your assessment: it should not require Lee or social media posts to tackle issues like this, that’s completely unscalable and not a realistic way to run a business.

It’s pretty irresponsible of you to be suggesting folks reach out directly to Lee when frontline support fails. That sucks for Lee and it’s bad for the Vercel business.

To be blunt with you, your comment does not read well. It looks like you’re ignoring very real problems and doing everything you can to dismiss them as “bad faith” when in fact there’s a demonstrable problem which shouldn’t be excused as growing pains but instead addressed head on. This kind of fanboyism doesn’t help anyone and I hope Vercel takes the time to reflect on this feedback and make real, meaningful changes.

[0]: https://github.com/vercel/community/discussions/1559#discuss...

Re: We Need To Talk About Vercel

#113

Post by eric-burel »

Kevcmk wrote: post #38

Vercel is deceitful. The Image/img fiasco really pulled the covers off for vercel for me. I have migrated all my work off of the platform. NextJS’ lint strategically dissuades you from using the img tag in favor of the NextJS Image component. If you make the mistake of heeding this advice and migrating to it, you can’t use static site generation—which means you are stuck using their hosting. Here’s one of the most PR…

You are talking about exporting app more precisely, which outputs a bunch of HTML files (vs using SSG for only some pages). You can keep the Image tag around very easily, there is an option to treat it as normal img tag, so no it doesn't block exporting, and I've tested it to confirm. Use an environment variable to enable or disable exporting. Edit to add reference: https://nextjs.org/docs/api-reference/next/image#unoptimized

Re: We Need To Talk About Vercel

#114

Post by hexidectom »

brillout wrote: post #107
flimsypremise wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say one of the big annoyances I've encountered while building applications with the last few versions of NextJS is the increasingly tight integration with the built-in server. The world of Node servers is pretty well-established, with documented interfaces that the major server platforms all implement and support. Simple stuff like res and req in the context and what those objects contain. With each release NextJ…

Seems like you may appreciate https://vite-plugin-ssr.com/ (I'm its author).

I love vite-plugin-ssr. Thanks for making it.

Re: We Need To Talk About Vercel

#115

Post by eric-burel »

neurostimulant wrote: post #110
satvikpendem wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have to use their hosting. I use their NextJS Docker container on Hetzner and it works just fine.

Does the tag work with the docker container? GP's issue is with how vercel was pushing the tag a lot yet it doesn't work when in static site generation mode which is used by a lot of people.

You can disable it to make it behave like an Image tag https://nextjs.org/docs/api-reference/next/image#unoptimized It works, it's just not optimized, that's not the same thing.

Re: We Need To Talk About Vercel

#117

Post by satvikpendem »

neurostimulant wrote: post #110
satvikpendem wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have to use their hosting. I use their NextJS Docker container on Hetzner and it works just fine.

Does the tag work with the docker container? GP's issue is with how vercel was pushing the tag a lot yet it doesn't work when in static site generation mode which is used by a lot of people.

It doesn't work in SSG, no, but it works in SSR just as if you hosted on Vercel itself. That's what I do, SSR instead of SSG, because for my app the distinction is unnecessary if I'm hosting it myself.

Re: We Need To Talk About Vercel

#118

Post by wahnfrieden »

Atlas22 wrote: post #53
jacooper wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly nothing compares to bandwidth free expenses with cloudflare especially with cloudflare R2. Also having different pricing for every region is very annoying.

The free version of cloudflare is essentially a "fair-use" offering, meaning that it is free until they decide its no longer free for you at their sole discretion [0]. Their terms of service prohibits distribution of any "disproportionate percentage" of non-HTML content [1]. That includes most of what you would want a CDN for: video, images, audio, binaries. They have exercised this discretion repeatedly for signific…

Free version also has some awful gaps in global coverage

Re: We Need To Talk About Vercel

#119

Post by wahnfrieden »

re-thc wrote: post #83
jacooper wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly nothing compares to bandwidth free expenses with cloudflare especially with cloudflare R2. Also having different pricing for every region is very annoying.

Cloudflare isn't 100% free unless it's only the US. Non business accounts get re-routed on major ISPs in quite a few countries. Quite an upfront cost.

Re routed?

Re: We Need To Talk About Vercel

#120

Post by mingw__ »

re-thc wrote: post #80
leerob wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, I'm on the team at Vercel. What could we do better? Open to your feedback. Our platform integrates with 30+ frameworks ( https://vercel.com/docs/frameworks ), we directly fund the development of Next.js and Svelte, and we sponsor Nuxt, Astro, Solid, and more.

Too many bugs. Too many features rushed out the door. Every major AND minor version of NextJs has new features and/or breaking changes, which is fine on its own but existing stuff often also break. We go through a cycle of: new feature -> patch fix -> minor fix -> improvement -> finally works -> replaced by something else OR it broke again. For something like NextJs that has been running for years maybe more focus on…

The Vercel way is to say "those aren't breaking changes, they're just bugs".
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