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
it's not all bad, i think the logged-out WebUI doesn't look bad, the new logged-out interaction modal is understandable and looks good (even though the sign-in and sign-up buttons currently do not bring you back to the action you were attempting), and having only one UI for the same resource is likely to alleviate confusion
i just wished it wasn't all rushed and revolving around trends and consideration were given for people that were not Gargron or imaginary twitter users