Interesting quantitative look at web performance and how designs made for people with high-end devices can be practically unusable for people on low-end devices, which disproportionately affects poorer people and people in developing countries. Also discusses how sites game Google’s performance metrics—maybe not news to the web devs among ye, but it was new to me. The arrogance of the Discourse founder was astounding.
RETVRN to static web pages.[1]
Also, from one of the appendices:
In principle, HN should be the slowest social media site or link aggregator because it’s written in a custom Lisp that isn’t highly optimized and the code was originally written with brevity and cleverness in mind, which generally gives you fairly poor performance. However, that’s only poor relative to what you’d get if you were writing high-performance code, which is not a relevant point of comparison here.
Although even static web pages can be fraught—see his other post on speeding up his site 50x by tearing out a bunch of unnecessary crap. ↩︎
Literally this site right here is a bloated pile of crap.
None of you need active updates for all the elements on screen! Just compile a static page on the server side and send it over!
Happily, we do have a nice (read-only) static version of Hexbear coded up by our very own @kota@hexbear.net: diethex.net! Here’s the announcement post with more details; it’s also linked in the sidebar on the home page. Funnily enough, in said announcement post someone links to an article which discusses the very blog post I posted here, so we’ve come full circle!
(also yes, kota is aware that spoilers don’t currently work)
Thank you for the wonderful and informative reply!
I wish there was a native Linux app for Lemmy. It would be a lot of work to make though. There are Android and iOS apps though.
I’m really disappointed by how bloated the lemmy frontend has become. Like, if they just cut the hyperlink preview/embed features that nobody needs it would already be a good bit lighter. There used to be an alternate lemmy frontend that emulated being a phpbb forum that was unfortunately abandoned: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmyBB
Also there is lem.el for emacs which works but it’s kinda basic and rough around the edges.
Honestly, if I was in charge of lemmy it would look basically like the site linked in the OP. And I’d also think about making it accessible from gopher/gemini.
I’m pretty sure there’s already a massive frontend rewrite in the works that is meant for after v1.0 of the backend is ready.