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by Lammy 1713 days ago
> The backend API calls are all serverless and instantiated on request.

I think the "Jamstack" is the single worst trend to ever happen to static site generators as both an author and a reader. The whole appeal of static sites to me is that all the files can live in one place. As a site author this minimizes the number of failure points and things I need to pay for, and as a reader it minimizes my trackable footprint online since connections only need to go to one place.

The "Jamstack" throws all of that out and encourages people to glue together as many third-party APIs as possible that they get to keep paying for forever and that cast the surveillance net ever-wider around readers. Of course nothing stops people from Missing The Point and throwing Google Analytics on a totally-static site, but "Jamstack" normalizes that behavior. This is the opposite of progress.

3 comments

> The "Jamstack" throws all of that out and encourages people to glue together as many third-party APIs as possible that they get to keep paying for forever and that cast the surveillance net ever-wider around readers. Of course nothing stops people from Missing The Point and throwing Google Analytics on a totally-static site, but "Jamstack" normalizes that behavior. This is the opposite of progress.

To be fair jamstack does not imply 3rd party APIs. A valid jamstack could all be on your own premises, just that every API is deployed independently.

That is a fair point. It still cuts you off from other forms of static distribution like IPFS/USB though.
While trying to understand what Jamstack actually is (or adds to simply using a SSG) I lost some faith due their site not functioning well in mobile safari. The filter buttons on the SSG page do not respond at all, and when you click a TOC item, the content silently loads below the fold (seems like we should jump down to the content).
Which site is this? Keen to resolve if one of my domains.

Tbh Wordpress nor Jamstack solve bad html.

I assume they're talking about Jamstack-dot-org by the mention of an SSG page with filter buttons: https://jamstack.org/generators/
Ye I think this could get messy at a point. This project ended up with 2 or 3 API endpoints which I pushed up as serverless to give me some centralisation.

Not sure how happy I'd be if I needed to stitch 50+ API services together but not every project has the same requirements and we shouldn't assume the same solution.