@clarfonthey Nope, I wish it were just that. Essentially all new development is in shiny do-it-all frameworks with a lifespan measured in dog years at best, and usually with an exploitative and unsustainable startup attached.

Almost everything that isn't "tools for building a bog standard startup webapp" has gone unmaintained, and pretty much no new such things are being built. There's nothing for newer protocols, native modules no longer work on newer Node versions and don't get updated anymore, practically nobody does cool weird experiments (like how WebTorrent started) anymore, and the entire community around it has basically been captured by LLM garbage specifically and startup culture more generally.

That's not an ecosystem anymore, that's a shopping mall.

@joepie91 not surprising at all tbh

@clarfonthey Yeah, it was a long time coming, I've even been yelling about it for a while already. Just sad to see that it ended up happening 'to completion'.

It's made me think a lot about the role that programming languages and their communities (should) have.

@joepie91 @clarfonthey So in your opinion where do we go from here if this is the case? Would you want the community at large to attempt to breathe life back into it or do you see another language/community/ecosystem with more promise?

@tachi @clarfonthey Honestly... probably neither. Sort of.

What happened to the JS ecosystem is a miniature version of what is happening everywhere in society; appropriation of the public commons, extractive businesses and capitalists taking over infrastructure and mindshare alike.

This means that trying to breathe life into it will most likely just result in doing more free labour for capitalists, because they own the ecosystem. Creating or moving to a new ecosystem, all else being equal, would just result in the same outcome again.

This is why (among some other issues) the deterioration of the JS ecosystem has made me think a lot about programming languages and their communities; I think we need some pretty fundamental changes in what "building a programming language" *means*, if we want to get a different outcome. The whole perception of both the scope of a programming language and the approach to support and community around it, is entirely based in the same "values-neutral" liberalism as most open-source, and by now we know where that leads.

I don't have any good answers to this, or at least not yet. But I just don't believe that "doing the same thing but in a different ecosystem" is going to fix anything in any sort of lasting way.