React is a great tool for building complex client-side apps, like Gmail, Spotify, or Discord. highly interactive software that needs to respond to user interactions in real-time, software that can't afford a round trip to the server every time the user performs an action.

these kinds of apps don't benefit from SSR. it's a micro-optimization that adds massive complexity for little gain.

these apps don't need to be indexed by search engines, since they're usually hidden behind login boxes. most of the time, they're launched once a day and then kept running in the background for hours at a time.

there's nothing to be gained from rendering these apps as HTML on the server.

🧵 2/3

the kinds of apps that benefit from SSR are those that mostly display static information. for example, blogs, landing pages, e-commerce websites, etc.

if you're choosing to build these apps in React for some reason, then i don't know what to tell you. you're a bad engineer making bad engineering choices. there are better, cheaper, more resilient options for building these apps than React.

but for some reason, these are exactly the sorts of apps that NextJS wants to enable. apps that should not be built in the first place. it's bizarre.

🧵 3/3

@karthikb351 yeah, that makes sense. it gives you a sort of jack-of-all-trades framework that you can use for building APIs, static pages, and SPAs all from a single codebase.

but ugh, the whole thing is so immature and messy and constantly changing for no reason. i'm building something with it right now, and simple things like connecting to a database or doing email/password authentication requires a million dependencies and feels so flaky.

very tempted to give up and switch to something else.