Well—wait. Is it not well known that the end-game for Astro is almost certainly to sell the company?
They’ve taken $10M from investors—likely to result in the same funding problem that Gatsby had—except with (imo) an even larger risk as they don’t seem to have started monetization efforts.
Zach Leatherman 5555 replies 3737 likes77 reposts Original on Mastodon55 replies
Certainly not claiming that Eleventy’s problems or risks are better, just different.
We’ve taken $0 from investors, which is definitely easier for me to manage long-term (what I’m optimizing for).
@zachleat In my experience, 95% of all VC funded competitors in our areas will vanish when you are playing the long-term game and just wait long enough. The other 5% will become so expensive that they end up as enterprise systems for a very exclusive audience.
@bastianallgeier @zachleat is that what they call becoming a "lifestyle company"?
@zachleat I think “more well understood” would be fair. It’s an open source framework with an MIT license.
I assume you own some domain names and graphics and such, and otherwise it can be endlessly remixed for people to try alternate paths.
The hard work of maintenance and compatibility, never mind new features, docs, community management, gets done as much as people volunteer or are paid to do it.
@boris I think the same could be said of Astro too, no? The framework is also open source/open licensed.
The nuance I’ve been thinking about is more FTE => biting off larger problems => larger code base => more maintenance risk when the company is sold.
Just for comparison I don’t think volunteers will maintain Gatsby given that the framework is owned by Netlify (and Netlify is laying off folks that used to do the job of maintaining Gatsby)
@zachleat yes the attendant dedicated entity with funding makes it muddier. For GPL (for instance), having an entity hold all the copyrights gives only it the ability to re-license.
Now that we know they won’t pursue hosting, what larger codebase features and thus services might they offer.
Potentially parallels Gatsby -> Gatsby Cloud entanglement.
Something something “maintainer deficit”
@boris ah just for the record I don’t think this *changes* their stance on whether or not they will pursue hosting—previously Netlify was the official hosting partner.
@zachleat for sure, it just means that there’s a blank space that isn’t hosting where we need to imagine paid services.
Having already switched official partners, we know that hosting isn’t tightly coupled in the open source framework.
@zachleat Dang, well, guess I might be moving my hastily ported personal site from Astro to…something else
@jkohlmann I don’t think I’d recommend that—port when porting is needed, I think!
@zachleat Touché 🙇🏼♂️ I chose Astro since it made it easy to incrementally move my old PHP and Sass site to something a bit more modern. In my case, that also means, if I ever do anything more with it, it’ll be a more elaborate rewrite. Thus I’d consider switching libraries / static site generators.
@jkohlmann @zachleat have you thought about porting it to PHP
@developit @zachleat I mean…I’d consider it, tbh (for this kind of site, anyway)
@developit @jkohlmann @zachleat hey there is nothing wrong with PHP! (Says the person who works with the dude who wrote PHP)
@ksylor @jkohlmann @zachleat lol oh I agree, was a genuine suggestion :P
@developit @ksylor @zachleat Yeah, I took it as such, don’t worry
@ksylor @developit @zachleat Legitimately “the best kind of static site generator is no static site generator”
function* generator() {
yield 'static site'
}@developit @ksylor @zachleat Dang, all this time, I could’ve gone frameworkless
@jkohlmann @ksylor @developit objection!!! Permission to treat as a hostile witness 😅
@zachleat Eleventy is for sure more of a community project than these VC infused projects.
One reason I eg have staid away from Prisma, Rome, Deno and similar.
When the VC money runs out there will be no one left to maintain them.
And VC:s sacrifices most companies in the hunt for the truly massive ones, so it’s always more likely that a VC-funded startup will fail than that it will succeed.
@zachleat Right, both options have risks. I think many framework authors moved in the funded direction because of the risks of being independent (i.e. minimal funding combined with high demand for resources). Funding solves the resources issue, but adds the risk of return on investment (i.e. monetize, get bought or go out of business). I'm obviously not saying anything you don't know, but, point is, the risk from an end user's perspective is probably similar (the project is no longer maintained)
@zachleat The problem for end-users right now is there are few alternatives. Eleventy is independent, but Next/Svelte are under Vercel (I know the structure is different), Gatsby is Netlify, Astro is VC funded. Essentially these all come with "preferred vendors" whether it's acknowledged or not. Not that end users are innocent in the equation. The demands we've put on framework authors have, in my opinion, almost forced them to seek funding.
@remotesynth @zachleat If I’m correct, Vercel owns and maintains Next, but Svelte is “owned” 100% by @rich_harris.
Vue/Nuxt are not “belonging” to any other corpo.
@meduz @zachleat @rich_harris I noted that the structure of Svelte under Vercel is different. As I understand it, Rich is paid full time by Vercel to work on it but it isn't owned by Vercel. And, yes, Vue is afaik funded through sponsorships.
@remotesynth Yeah, this all seems accurate to me. The one weird piece is that the risk to authors is fairly well known (to authors) but the risk to app developers (end users/framework consumers) is not.
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@ben_seven the @davatron5000 check never cleared!!!
@zachleat @davatron5000 rogue banking error, surely he’s good for it
I guess I'm old school, but it twists my brain into a knot trying to understand the ecosystem around venture funded open source projects.
It's so counter to ... everything I've known about software up until 2019.
I guess, 20 years into the future, we'll see this as a strange blip.
@kixxauth would you call it a zero interest rate phenomenon
@zachleat Ha! Yeah, I guess from a capital and finance perspective it is very reflective of a zero interest rate era :D
Never would have guessed it would impact open source web development frameworks ;-p
@kixxauth I can very much recommend this episode from Tech Won't Save Us: https://techwontsave.us/episode/180_abolish_venture_capital_w_edward_ongweso_jr
TLDR; Venture Capital is a plague on society that keeps on festering and intends to infiltrate all parts of human living, to commodify the most mundane parts of it.
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@zachleat Maybe I'm out of the loop but I'd also like to know how they want to earn money, the initial post didn’t say https://astro.build/blog/the-astro-technology-company/
@lekoarts I haven’t heard anything about it either, fwiw
@eliancodes @lekoarts I think the concern here is that folks are worried that a VC-backed company without a monetization strategy is a pretty risky thing to bet on
@zachleat @eliancodes @lekoarts Everything's perishable, right? With companies you worry that they might fail. With BDFL you worry about bus factor. A foundation is probably the safest place for a project, but even those seem to take on more than they can maintain. Good thing about SSG is that once you deploy you can throw away the framework you used to build it, if you want.
@matthewp @zachleat @eliancodes For my hobby projects I wouldn’t care, for my business I would care a lot.
Bit surprised to hear that there are no concrete plans, normally no one just gives money away for free.
Projects like Next, Astro, Gatsby, etc. are so complex, once no one gets paid anymore to work on them it’s impossible for the community to immediately pick it up unless preparations were made and non-company core contributors were taught.
@lekoarts @zachleat @eliancodes There are concrete plans, but not ones I can share here now. Stay tuned.
@zachleat that is 100% why I will not use it. Because it is not upfront with how they intend to monetise.
It is so clear that they are intending to sell it to someone else. This feels extremely sour to me, because especially with these types of technologies, you are selling a community, or access to a community.
I didn't say anything because I thought I was just paranoid, but that is just how venture capitalism works, and they very much participate.
No shade to the devs, but it is a reality.
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@zachleat This is exactly why I ditched any interest in it the moment VC funding was announced.
@zachleat everybody wants to crack the WordPress hegemony. They just haven’t found the right combination of frontend/backend/cms yet.
No monetization strategy we know of is a bad look for Astro. Sad, because their community and contributors are great. Their Discord is super lively but moderated really well and very helpful. Their docs are super helpful and thorough.
@flori yeah, well said—the whole team is awesome
@zachleat We'll see about that 🤷🤷
@zachleat I’ve lamented similar previously too (https://twitter.com/benschwarz/status/1585482090971136001). Gatsby’s seed was $5m at a time when that was described by some as a “mango” seed round (yes, I know 🤮).
It sounds weird, but you can raise a bunch of money to get 3-5 years down the line, then side step to actual adults take over when it’s probably too late anyway. Tech never learns.
