my beefs with Mastodon's recent “let's get rid of server-side-rendered pages” changes:
- the new landing page is literally designed around trending posts, tags and links, it does not make sense without it
- enabling search for logged-out users means anyone can now query the search API to enumerate all users and hashtags known to the instance
- pages that did not require javascript now do so (which will also mean if we end up using javascript features not supported on some browser, visiting will just result in an error page—that should be a rare occurrence but still)
- while it undoubtedly help with the confusion around having two interfaces for a local user, i'm not sure it helps with the confusion around local VS remote instances
- as always, it's done unilaterally with no concertation, and no fuck is given to downstreams