this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2024
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Lemmy, e.g. this here site, uses React too. Probably about as weirdly as they use Rust, even as the site appears to present an ok front end.
it’d be very nice to have a progressively enhanced static frontend instead since there’s really nothing about any of this that should require JavaScript (and something like unpoly would give us react SPA style functionality strictly as an enhancement on top of plain HTML)
this might be a cool project for someone to pick up once work on Philthy gets going; most of the alternative Lemmy frontends still have an unnecessary JS framework dependency, or are lacking features for essentially no reason
we used to strive for minimum possible front-end payload, and it was an embarrassment to do anything with JS that wasn't backed up by a non-js default. Will never forget how suddenly React removed all those things from front-end team meetings.
They were solid industry-wide concerns that just... disappeared
Remember when our industry cared about loading times?
I remember seeing an argument on reddit between a css dev that understood the depth of the responsive design philosophy and a dismissive Reacter that shut them down by calling them an old "list-aparter"
facebook used to lie about react being faster than native on first load and navigation, in spite of that being impossible by both lived experience and as measured by benchmarks. supposedly templating is just too heavyweight for servers to handle at the mythical Amazon scale literally nobody reaches except Amazon but every shitty manager needs us to be ready for
and now that react can do server-side rendering I guess we’re doing templating again, but in node and much less efficient and with extremely unclear semantics around when it switches to client rendering, and also weird bugs when things render differently under SSR
also it’s still measurably much slower than old school server templating
Ah yes, Amazon, the company with literally the shittiest front-end of all in existence. AWS is downright unusable outside of the CLI, but hey, at least they scale??
you know, for as much poison’s been poured into my ear about how everything must be Amazon scale, there’s no way in fuck they use react for their storefront or AWS, is there? I think the only reason react is considered an Amazon-scale frontend (besides Facebook, which also has a shitty UI, though not as bad as Amazon, and notoriously uses PHP for everything) is how hard they push it as part of AWS Amplify, a toolchain they say will help you reach their scale (but from experience: it absolutely will not, it’s just a set of technologies that increase your AWS bill and perform like shit, which is why Amazon doesn’t use it for anything of value themselves)
the only case I can immediately think of of a very major site going from server rendering to react is GitHub (which used to use Ruby on Rails and Erlang, apparently) and it’s been an unmitigated disaster — none of the new features that supposedly require react are good, the performance fucking sucks now, and the thing keeps breaking (I get weird renders with broken styling every few refreshes and apparently I’m not the only one). the fucking thing even hijacks the keyboard shortcuts I use and has become an accessibility nightmare, all in the name of pointlessly turning it into a react SPA and vscode wannabe.
Hey, GitHub might be shitty in the browser, but did you consider that it's also shitty as an Android app?