So, it may feel like I’m harping on a bit about JSR—the tech industry’s latest attempt to ‘fix’ the JavaScript ecosystem—but it kind of bugs me how little discussion there is about it
Like, it’s literally a proposal by a VC-funded startup to coopt existing infrastructure and the only comments I’m seeing online are “ooh, they put a lot of work into making it fast.”
There’s no discussion of what it’s for, whether it tells us anything about npm or how that can be improved.
There’s just no discourse. And I mean discourse in the academic “fields need discourse to establish conventions and practices” sense, not the “social be drama” sense.
Has everybody just given up? Is the web development field just running on inertia—our practices governed by whatever was the most popular approach when copilot was first trained?
@baldur I hadn't heard of JSR before, but I suspect that a lot of us are just burned out from the constant assault of these sorts of "coopt the ecosystem" projects and the uncritical lens through which most users have adopted them.
There was once a very strong "public commons" spirit in JS-land, but there's not much left of it today. It's been pretty much killed off by a combination of startup bullshit, and misdirected JS bashing from outsiders.
(The reason that those eg. "faster" claims worked to market things to begin with, is that attributing negative traits to "JS" as a whole without ever inspecting or understanding the real reason has become so socially acceptable, that people will jump on anything that claims to fix it. After all, if you never understood why it was broken, you won't be able to recognize whether something is a correct solution either...)
@joepie91 This is a good point. Like you say web dev has been caught between being coopted by dishonest tech cos and been seen by outsiders as not worth defending. Then we had the mass layoffs and—honestly—it’s not surprising that there isn’t much of a community-driven field left.
@baldur I've been spending way too many of the past years debunking misdirected bashing, debunking hyped-up claims from coopting tech, and more generally trying to get people to stop painting all of JS with the same brush, precisely because I was afraid of an outcome like this, where everybody who cares is either chased out or burned out.
I don't think I've ever seen less solidarity for an activist campaign than this one. Even many nominally radical folks gleefully joined in with the bashing and responded aggressively to that behaviour getting called out, without taking a moment to consider the implications of it.
And so, here we are. I think basically everyone has given up by this point. Because there was no support network, and people ignored our calls for help.