[byearthithatius]

But how many use _just_ React now? There is a whole stack that 90% of YC companies use: Node, pnpm, Next, React, doing SSR by default. Idk about it all. Most of the time when I ask why they do SSR they can't tell me a valid reason. Their bundle sizes are so big for what the apps do.

[landl0rd]

I've used plain react for a few things in the past few years. I strongly prefer it to next/nuxt/all this other stuff. Preact and an understanding of best practices can make it fairly performant with a more or less drop-in replacement if you're willing to sacrifice compatibility with absolutely all the ecosystem.

I still prefer svelte but it's less mature and universally-known. React is still a pretty good choice if you need something that will more or less work and that anyone can write.

[Imustaskforhelp]

My issue is opposite.

I know svelte/sveltekit and would want to contribute to svelte apps (a good reminder that I should)

But there are some projects that I really really want to contribute to / heck even port to sveltekit like cinny and hedgedoc and the likes and so I almost feel pressured by the system to learn react so that I can finally feel confident enough to understand their repositories as they scare me right now...

Cinny:https://github.com/cinnyapp/cinny Hedgedoc:https://github.com/hedgedoc/hedgedoc

[0xblinq]

Anyone can write svelte. Or solid. Or Angular.

I don’t even want to talk to somebody that defines themselves as a “React” developer. Let alone work with them.

If you know any of these frameworks, and the basics of web development you can work in any of them.

So the hiring part is not an excuse for this.

[torben-friis]

>Most of the time when I ask why they do SSR they can't tell me a valid reason.

Isn't it mainly about playing nice with crawlers? SEO and the like?

(that was my understanding but I'm a backend dev).

[Jcampuzano2]

Yes but they obsess over making everything perfectly ssr to the point of both delivering slow and half the time making client side navigations slow as hell after the user is already past the pay walled/marketing material part of your app.

Honestly except for the marketing page and blogs and stuff, most apps are fine without server rendering. In fact I'd say many that avoid server rendering actually feel better simply because next.js makes it really easy to screw up your performance doing it.

[sroussey]

Some site have dual pages these days. I guess I should explain… they have a large footprint seo and those pages are static… unless you are logged in, then they are completely different!

I see this happening in finance data sites. Say a page about Apple, has stock price, etc. when logged in, same stuff but 10x data so they layout and everything is different.

[fakedang]

That seems to be the only big plus with NextJS and SSR. But a big reason behind that was how Vercel made NextJS accessible to so many newbie devs right during Covid season. I was one of those new learners picking up React through it. Out of all the frameworks, Next was the most well-documented and more straightforward. The extras such as the straightforward routing and the availability of templates by vercel made things all the more easier for many to pick up. Meanwhile React was languishing and most of the other alternatives were just all over the place.

That being said, I'm waiting in the back stage, like many other folks, for tanstack to get production-ready, because of the all the weird crap being pulled by Vercel on NextJS.

[fruit2020]

Do people really build SPAs that are just websites and not ‘apps’?

[ozim]

Reading comments here, Reddit or other places my guess is lots of people don’t know the difference between just a website and an app. Even ones that seem experienced.

Lots of newcomers are struggling and not understanding what are the options and which approach is best for their case.

Business people don’t help as they rightfully don’t care. But they want „do everything” - „pay once” approach so people bolt on static pages ona apps or other way around.

[byearthithatius]

I have over ten years experience and the distinction isn't always clear to me.

Example: This logistics SPA I was building I realized could just be single pages with some data for most of the stuff (tracking, inventory, etc...) but for admins they wanted a whole dashboard. This was a conditional on some value of the stored session user. So it ended up being kinda a website for parts of it and an SPA admin panel if the user conditionally matched some privileges. Probably should have been separate stacks but they used the same data so early on they made it the same Next app.

I don't think the whole website vs app thing is always as simple as static blog pages vs full fledged JS-heavy app. There is a spectrum and overlap even within a single "application" because of various requirements.

Your last sentence is the most accurate. I don't think its primarily ignorance, its just trying to meet all the requirements while retaining some level of organization in the codebase.

[dhosek]

Sadly, yes. Fortunately, most of them are developers’ toys, but not all.

[byearthithatius]

I mean the docs of most of the frameworks are written in that framework even though its just static pages. Didn't even need the framework but not using your own framework for docs feels ... bad I guess?

[b_e_n_t_o_n]

I think most are still using React with maybe React Router. Node and Pnpm aren't really complicated or difficult to use, neither is Vite.

[habibur]

> when I ask why they do SSR

What are the reasons for not doing SSR?

[byearthithatius]

Why is it the default for you? You are worrying about hydration complexity and all that when you introduce it, so it better have some benefits.

My default is a small page that client then fetches any additional data it needs. If its long load time skeleton UI it. I also have not seen the SEO benefits at all.

So again _why would I_ unless I needed to do stuff on the server to make the client bundle, which I don't.

A lot of these YC companies doing this could literally just be using a fetch because their backend is dead simple REST.

[array_key_first]

SSR can be a tactic to avoid complexity. Basically, let's not duplication state on the frontend and then create synchronization. Just say the backend owns it.

[b_e_n_t_o_n]

Yeah, but when it's used in conjunction with js frameworks it ends up being more complicated than pure SPA or SSR.

[scrame]

want the whole point of Javascript to use client side manipulation? Is it's come back to SSR, then do we need all the JS baggage?

[twelvechairs]

Its a division of responsibilities thing isnt it? "Proper coders" in python or whatever provide up to an API. Past that its basically the web devs domain and they live in JS land

[byearthithatius]

Agree, that is why I am confused by his question to me. Like SSR should be the default. Why does your server by default "hydrate" the client bundle. Why can't the client bundle request data as it needs it (then we can only request what the user needs). Skeleton UI it while you fetch. Then you have great page load time because you just return a static HTML+JS bundle that was non-conditionally built. In SSR it talks to the DB before it even constructs the bundle, that is oof right? So you are faster because you don't even gen the HTML until you talked to the DB? I give the user plain HTML instantly and talk to the DB while I give them a UI indicating its loading. SSR just moved the load time to before initial render. Stupid IMO.