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BothsidesistFraud@lemmy.world

We should start calling it the "Web" Generation (midwest.social)

submitted 2 weeks ago by sxan@midwest.social to c/opinionhavers@lemmy.world

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I've noticed increasing requests in places like !selfhosted@lemmy.world 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?

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[–] null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I agree in some ways.

I'm absolutely committed to having my notebook or "personal knowledge base" or whatever be a simple directory containing text files. You can sync it how you wish (yes syncthing) and use whatever native editors or whatever you wish. A self hosted notebook / wiki / editor type thing just adds a few layers of abstraction from your actual task of managing information. About a month ago I discovered tried helix editor with ghostty terminal emulator and I've become a little bit obsessive about that actually.

Is it possible that a hosted image resizer or file hasher might be a web development thing? Being able to resize images with an api like this is common:

https://imageresizer.mydomain.com/targetimagedomain.com/cat.jpg?w=200

Also, it's not really "self hosted" per se but I strongly suspect someone has wrapped imagemagick in a docker container so you can docker run imagemagick/imagemagick --resize cat.jpg or similar.

I realise that you jest about the calculator, this isn't really a rebuttle but I've been studying remote sensing recently and the unit is focussed on R the language. R studio is... well, a glorified graphical calculator and yes I run it in a docker container and access it with a web ui. It's pretty amazing.

On the other hand about 9 months ago I migrated from web-based email (with fastmail) to local thunderbird. I changed because I found fastmail's pricing egregious and after changing to mxroute they only had roundcube and similar which I found a bit unweildy. To be frank I don't particularly like thunderbird and I kinda miss fastmail. The only reason I mention is because this is pretty much the only example I can think of of going from web to native rather than the other way around.

[–] sxan@midwest.social 1 points 8 hours ago

I agree in some ways.

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.

strongly suspect someone has wrapped imagemagick in a docker container so you can docker run imagemagick/imagemagick --resize cat.jpg or similar.

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.

The only reason I mention is because this is pretty much the only example I can think of of going from web to native rather than the other way around.

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.

[–] anamethatisnt@sopuli.xyz 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I mean back when I went to school it wasn't very hard to use a livecd to add my own local administrator account to the school laptop. Windows XP wasn't all that when it came to security and as long as you didn't flaunt it the teachers didn't care.
I imagine many in the younger generations had to find web based solutions for what sounds like local apps to us as they weren't allowed to install anything.
Changing a habit/workflow isn't the easiest of things.

[–] sxan@midwest.social 2 points 2 weeks ago

This is a very good point, and one that would explain much.