Netlify's disingenuous survey-based attack on Next.js (and eleventy, too)

I was a happy Netlify user for years until they silently took down my app without warning. They blocked my account based on a bogus DMCA claim, the details of which point to a DIFFERENT app with a similar name. Unacceptable behavior from a hosting provider. I'll never use them again.

As someone who has pissed away thousands of team hours working with the next.js abomination I’m very happy to see Astro take off. I keep thinking “this looks like one of my very first terribly architected, organically created messes”. Astro may not be better, but just statistically speaking you probably aren’t going to be worse. Next is a house of cards. The architecture is as bad as the code base. The only features anyone wants are perpetually in beta. The documentation is probably the only thing worse than the runtime. We dropped SSR and used prerender.io to accomplish SEO and look back at that decision as a great one. I want to try Astro, looks more professional and propose built. Not at all interested in SaaS hosting.

Thought experiment: assume the worst: next.js + eleventy is in decline; what does it change in the short-term? It is likely that people using those frameworks are getting things done in them. To me, the fact this whole discussion is happening illustrates how fickle devs are in this particular ecosystem.<p>It&#x27;s like nobody wants to be caught dead using something that <i>might</i> not be the new hotness.

Netlify founder here.<p>The survey is a reflection of what our community responded.<p>Next is the largest framework in usage and is really will liked by it&#x27;s users. This is clearly visible in the charts of the survey.<p>But for the first time we’ve run this survey, Next decreased in usage year over year (from 47% to 46%).<p>Astro jumped all the way from 11% to 18% with 87% responding they want to use it more.<p>Eleventy dropped in usage from our respondents from 19% last year to 16% this year.<p>None of this is an attack on anyone, it’s just data from our survey. The rise of Astro is one of the most newsworthy bits of data from the survey and reflects genuine excitement in the community we’re part of.

I really like the chart that he objects to. It is pretty clearly labeled as change and it helps highlight new and potentially interesting things. Would be neat to have a chart like that for lots of things—games on steam, news topics, community events, movies—anywhere you want to quickly grasp what the buzz is.<p>It doesn’t make next&#x2F;eleventy look bad (of course they are ranked near the origin given their maturity and adoption). It makes Astro look like something worth investigating for a few minutes.

I don&#x27;t have even a smidge of the background apparently required to make sense of this article. What is Netlify&#x27;s battle with Vercel? What is their promotion and apparent now distancing from Jamstack about? Which frameworks would Netlify have ulterior motives to promote or disparage?

When my team cut our monthly Netlify costs by $1.5k, Netlify didn&#x27;t inquire why, contrasting with GCP&#x27;s prompt response to a similar spending reduction. Our departure from Netlify was due to significant bugs in Netlify&#x27;s Next.js Edge and double billing us when Git contributors didn&#x27;t map cleanly to Netlify accounts, despite us using Github OAuth. Support individuals were great, but it seems like their advocacy for us fell on deaf ears within the Product&#x2F;Engineering camp.<p>Even more puzzling was that a few months prior, their partnerships team had been working with us to get our customers&#x27; ecommerce storefronts on the platform. Netlify&#x27;s (then) head of partnerships left and nobody else followed up ever. Our customers are now pointed at Fly.io instead, and everyone is quite happy with that recommendation.<p>My anecdote, and this article, seems like evidence of Netlify&#x27;s reactivity to Vercel over customer-oriented growth. Vercel, in contrast, is more focused on developing open-source projects that organically brings people in.

I remember being astonished at the time of Netlify&#x27;s rise that someone had the audacity to compete with (a slice of) Amazon S3, and heartened to see what looked like success (usage). Alas, it seems it was a zero interest mirage, and the situation is as it always was, that only the bigs have sustainable business models in web services, especially the more open, generic ones.<p>edit: what&#x27;s with the downvotes, did I offend someone?