[Joeri]

You can keep servers dumb, but some kinds of product features demand the servers to do the job. And then if you want to squeeze the most out of the server as it relates to your client app, RSC is one way to look at it.

I feel like the design space of making the server as dumb as possible is not sufficiently explored yet. I’m imagining PWAs that work offline by default, hosted on static hosting, talking to CORS-unlocked PKCE-authenticated APIs, storing their state as dumb files in APIs like dropbox, and doing all of the cross-client p2p syncing and merging client-side inside of a service worker.

It wouldn’t work for all categories of software, but so much productivity software ultimately reduces to a per-user file paradigm instead of a central database (outliners, notes, task managers, image editors, …) that I think a lot of complex web apps could be built this way. They wouldn’t work well on low end android phones, but then most of the products from those categories already don’t work well there, when half their logic is still on the server.

And yes, I know, Apple does not play nice with PWAs, but I still think there’s something there that I wish more people would explore.