I've noticed increasing requests in places like [email protected] people asking for self-hosted or free web solutions for things that, to me, seem to be absurd tasks to go to web apps for. Examples I've seen are:
- Self hosted file hasher
- Self hosted image resizer
- Note apps
There are dozens of these. They vary in the amount of "reasonably benefit from being online," but mostly I'm coming to believe that it's because this group of people either don't realize there's a difference between native and web apps, or ... well, I don't know what the alternative is.
Going to a web app to resize an image is sheer idiocy. It's something for which there is a dozen of free, open-source, native mobile apps that don't require an internet connection, are faster, and are entirely within the capability of any mobile smart phone that would be able to access a web page. And it's even crazier on the desktop: even if you are incapable of using a CLI and running convert
, you're probably running some desktop that has a graphics program that can resize an image. Why, the hell, would you self-host a service like this? The same goes for generating checksums of files.
Ok, so you need something to actually host an image for you, because your Lemmy client seems incapable of uploading images. That's a web service. And note taking? That's on the "almost acceptable as a web service", if you for some reason can't run SyncThing. Again, there are GUI markdown editors galore, text editors for the raw doggers, and numerous mobile apps that can more-or-less WYSIWYG markdown much less just plain text editors.
I haven't yet seen someone ask for an online calculator, but it's just a matter of time. Just... why? Are people really no longer capable of distinguishing between web and native apps, or is there some other reason I'm overlooking?
There are some things better done as a web app, but I'm hard pressed to think of things that aren't merely examples where the web interface is simply better than any native thing anyone's bothered building.
I'm biased. I've really learned to hate SPAs, and all their ilk. HTML standardized a decent protocol for simple communications, and HTML evolved into the universal UX toolkit everyone wanted. All of the parts sound reasonable, but the result is a hideous unusable mess that's hard to deploy and maintain, or else you don't own your data. When the inventor of the Web, Tim Berners Lee, commented that he was appalled at what his creation had become, I think every technical person should have stopped and given it a good, long thought about it.
Oh, absolutely. Take a perfectly good CLI tool that's installed by default in 80% of the distros, through a web interface on top amd wrap that 19MB tool in a 300MB container. Fabulous.
Hmmm. I've been going in entirely the other direction. I find CLI tools that either can do things natively, or which scrape the web site so I don't have to deal with the GB of Java, CSS, ads, CAPTCHA... yt-dlp let's me use YouTube without a browser. ddg lets me search Duck Duck Go from the command line, and get results back in the terminal. I've never used Subsonic, but I do use ostui, which is an OpenSubsonic client for the terminal. The only good web service is one which exposes a decent RESTful interface, against which people can write good interfaces that don't require a browser, tracking cookies, or JavaScript.