Post #3970677
2026-07-20 15:28 UTC
@b0rk@social.jvns.ca Yeah, though I don't think you need to go that aggressive in many cases. Containerization is pretty solid if not perfect. Non-root containerization like podman is a step again. Having a narrower interface like CGI or FastCGI is again a help. But some of it is that what we want in a platform _just barely_ crosses into what's hard to provide cheaply. Static hosting is _so easy_ in comparison, because it's just data.
A trick that might be viable to revive is a relatively common if not standard set of available dynamic tools provided by the host. Users don't get to supply dynamic things but they do get to use the host's.
Now that code generation is pretty trivial, the actual economics of that might have changed favorably. (I am always surprised how much LLMs change the economics in ways that enable some old-school things to work now. I'm unsure the net benefits and the whole calculus of it, but there's avenues worth understanding.)
The big one however is backups. Modern cloud systems make this the user's problem. Old school hosting made it the admin's problem. Servers as 'cattle not pets' works great when you have a durable data store you back up and snapshot. When you're talking about a bunch of tiny data but that is valuable and should be backed up, things get weird. There's something to be said for the 'servers as pets' mentality there. The fundamental contract there is that Someone Has Your Back With The Data. That's something we've lost, and I think that's bad.
Replies (1)
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@aredridel@kolektiva.social 2026-07-20 15:30
@b0rk@social.jvns.ca I also have been thinking for a while that a constrained "you get 64MB of compute" is actually a really good unit. It packs densely. It's plenty to do some immense tasks. It requires you to not waste resources. It might just be an enabling constraint if providers managed to make it a utility that you could depend on. WASM has a lot of shades of this too. It could, in theory, enable dense dynamic computing for mostly-static sites. The problem is that someone has to take responsibility for the data, or make it _possible_ for users to take responsibility for it usefully.