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Nolan Lawson

I also saw it as a way to push the limits of what the web could do. However, I've become a bit chastened and disillusioned about this. For instance:

- Pinafore doesn't have nice animated transitions like native apps do. The web still sucks at this.
- Offline support is almost impossibly hard given Mastodon's API. The main benefit of IDB right now is low memory usage.
- PWAs haven't come far enough. Pinafore isn't listed in app stores, so it "doesn't exist" for most users.

14 Feb 2021 at 23:16 | Open on toot.cafe
3 comments
Eugen Rochko

@nolan What about the API makes offline support impossible?

14 Feb 2021 at 23:18 | Open on mastodon.social
Nolan Lawson

@Gargron I maybe overstated my case. A lot of it is not Mastodon's fault but just how hard it is to write offline-first apps in general.

When I worked on PouchDB, we had a whole sync protocol between the client and server that dealt with versioning, conflicts, etc. You just called `db.sync()` and you were done. I don't expect Mastodon to add this, but it's just an example of the kind of thing I miss from the PouchDB world.

14 Feb 2021 at 23:22 | Open on toot.cafe
charlag

@Gargron @nolan you don't get what happened while you've been offline. I was burned by it before with Tusky. You have a list of posts in db but you can't just show them from db, some of them get deleted or favs etc

14 Feb 2021 at 23:25 | Open on birb.site
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