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1domlast Tuesday at 9:40 AM1 replyview on HN

I agree, nothing is perfect, there's a time and place for everything - I just think the coverage and advocacy of SSGs is disproportionate to the number of places where they improve things. I'm going to summarise the discussions I've had in this topic in a post over the next few weeks and I'll post it here. Thanks for humouring and challenging me :)

I still do feel there's something not quite right. Hopefully I'll be able to get it out in the summary as I think we're all done with walls of text here. But I think you actually captured it perfectly in your last remark:

> For my own solo projects, the ease of hosting for static sites is often such a big win for me that I'm willing to forego some interactivity even though more interactive features would be nice.

They make the web worse for the world by tempting the developer to take the easier, less interactive route than what would have been taken in the pre-SSG world.

I think I'm troubled by this because the idea "it makes it easy to do the lazy, worse thing" seems completely at odds with the fact that it seems to be what the people I would consider leaders in the field are doing. That's why I still wonder if this view might be a me problem, or maybe the field is just moving backwards? I don't know.

Anyway, thanks again!


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seanwilsonlast Tuesday at 1:41 PM

> They make the web worse for the world by tempting the developer to take the easier, less interactive route than what would have been taken in the pre-SSG world.

If I didn't have the static site option though, I might not host a project at all because I don't want to have to deal with the maintenance burden. I haven't kept up but it would be nice if there were more options between a no-maintenance static site hosting, and a high-maintenance dynamic site.

Would be amazing if the web/browsers had standardized ways by now of easily adding common website features like authentication, search, comments, votes, and saving user data (via bring your own storage) that didn't require everyone to host and maintain a custom stack. Email is a solved problem that you don't have to host yourself for example, why is it still such an effort for the other common website features?

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