Thread by @Jermolene

Stand by for a bit of a rant prompted by @philandstuff’s encouraging tweet about serverlessness

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My heretical view is that a “serverless” platform is one that can operate successfully without needing to rely on any server whatsoever

TiddlyWiki was literally serverless in 2004, but it was at @Osmosoft in 2007/8 with @jayfresh, @psd and others that we understood the value

Some of the value is from needing *no* server, but the more interesting stuff comes from the independence to talk to *any* server

And some value stems from TiddlyWiki also being a literal single page application: a standalone HTML file with no inherent dependencies

So, the first value of literal serverlessness is to give users airgap-level privacy: privacy that anyone can verify for themselves

The second value of literal serverlessness is to permit trivial archiving for as long as there are web browsers

The third value of literal serverlessness is the flattening of the costs of supporting multiple UI variants from a sole server

Anyone can fork a TiddlyWiki-based UI: just copy the file and start modifying it. Stateless functions in the cloud don’t care who calls them

The value to users of literal serverlessness is shifting control from server to client, enabling scalable, independent innovation at edge

That last one is the humdinger, and it’s worth a little sub-rant to explain why it matters so much to me…

I think the highest calling for software developers is to gift their own capabilities to ordinary users (at a higher level of abstraction)

Making software is too vital an ability to be confined to software developers; it's the most important new power for changing our world

Never mind teaching people to fish, we should make it easy to learn to build fishing rods

I don't just love TiddlyWiki and HyperCard, I love Excel, Mathematica, – all the generative apps that let users build their own things

Generative apps are the only way the industry can serve niches like teaching HS volleyball - pespot.tiddlyspot.com

Meanwhile I work in an industry in which adding stickers to messaging apps is considered innovation

But even messaging apps could be generative: imagine being able to build and share a manual/story/manifesto from your message stream

Not proud of being easily riled, but some of that rant was provoked by the way that grown-up developers see TiddlyWiki as deeply infra dig