Comment by benatkin
20 days ago
While I’m not quite sure what we’re talking about here in terms of platforms, I’ll mention a couple of personal and team server platforms that are subject to the Zombocom Problem and a couple that aren’t. WordPress, NextCloud, and OwnCloud try to be all you need and even though they have plugins they seem subject to the Zombocom problem, because stuff gets shoehorned into a particular app. On the other hand there is https://sandstorm.org/ and Dokku, which let you run an app and just give resources to them, so if you want to run a Trello clone you can just run the Trello clone.
Sandstorm had a clear goal of getting critical mass and changing personal servers forever and I think in many ways it was close.
WordPress is the exact example of the opposite of your point. WP started as the edge of a wedge. But contrary to the examples in TLA, it didn't become an everything platform deliberate and predetermined, but organical and messy.
It started as a "blogging tool" and only that - it still is to some extent in 2024: it still has traces of "blogs" in its DBA, code, templating and so on.
It was successfull exactly because of that focus. As opposed to Joomla! and Drupal and many others that never even made it. WordPress gained a "plugin system" but later than most others and far more limited. In the beginning plugins were really to customize your blog - but it was still very much a blog.
When blogging wasn't that popular anymore - relatively, it pivoted into more of a brochureware CMS by leveraging the plugin system, but core was very much still a blog. I can't recall how many requests I had from customers to "remove this confusing blog-thing, we don't use that don't we". It could not be removed.
Then, after a while, it became the everything CMS. Slowly and rediculously clumsy. It still is. It's far worse at "being a webshop" than almost all dedicated webshop software one can choose instead. It's rediculously inadequate for anything close to "social media" - or user-generated content (due to its depenance on- and design of- the caching, mostly).
So, WP may be some "everything platform" by popularity and common use. But it's both bad at this and never predetermined to be that.
What would you choose instead, in this day and age?
For what?
That's the crucial question. Because the important parameter to "what is best ?" isn't the "day and age", but the exact use-case, and to lesser extent, requirements, existing stacks, team capabilities etc etc.
If you have a company with 58 wordpress instances, then I'm pretty sure the best option for almost any use-case for the 59th instance is "wordpress".
But if you are an artist that makes and sells bracelets from local sea-shells, with little interest in learning technical stuff, you are almost certainly better of with an etsy and/or shopify. If only for the TCO.
And the bakery around the corner who just needs their opening hours and some nice impression in the form of a video, story and some images (brochureware) online, wix, squarespace or one of its many (open source) competitors. Or, if you just need a quick three-page landingpage for your tech startup, in a team of mostly software engineers, a hugo or jekyll site is quite probably by far preferable.
There are so many alternatives that "do one thing and do it well (or better than the generalists without focus)". It's really about having the ability to filter through these instead.
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I don't think WordPress is a good example at all. All sorts of weird stuff gets shoehorned into Excel (see the horrors of any prop trading firm). The point is: Excel is wildly successful, because before it was a platform, it was a solution to an important specific problem. Same with WordPress.
You're falling into the Zombocom trap when your initial value proposition is the same as Zombocom's.
Good point. WordPress is the wildly successful one of the five I mentioned.
It also did this to a certain extent, from the post:
> This customer acts as the edge-of-the-wedge for expanding into adjacent use cases (next best customer is music)
These include various types of content (VideoPress, portfolio plugins, podcasts, custom post types), shopping (WooCommerce), and forums (BuddyPress, bbPress)
However, it isn't quite a general purpose self-hosted app platform. Something limited it from continuing it going into adjacent use cases, and I think part of it is that its plugins still tie into a system that's still oriented towards blog/CMS use cases.
Sandstorm's architecture is incredible, and I love it a lot.
In my opinion though, it did kinda fall into this. It was an extremely secure and well thought out way to run concurrent user web apps. But none of the apps there were better than the proprietary Google suite or equivalent, and for self hosters, the need to explicitly port the app vs the simpler but less secure and less integrated 'just run a docker container' meant it lost there too.
There's also some limitations on what the apps can do, for example, I don't think Sandstorm has a good story for searching and indexing the contents of grains, the way other services could.
I think the killer app idea at the time was hospitals or governments with strict regulations and it didn't land well enough.
They chose apps that had personality. For instance, one of their flagship apps, Rocket.Chat, had a slash command for lenny face. https://docs.rocket.chat/docs/slash-command
This was good, and goes against the Zombocom problem.
However, as you said they didn't address self-hosting as well as they could have. I don't think it was because of other domains, but because they were envisioning people sharing them or paying for a cloud host, and didn't try to emphasize only apps that don't guzzle CPU, memory, or storage. Rocket.Chat is a MongoDB app. GitLab is another one: https://apps.sandstorm.io/app/zx9d3pt0fjh4uqrprjftgpqfwgzp6y...
Similarly on Dokku you wouldn't have apps sharing a database instance. If you had two apps that needed a database, you'd start two postgres instances.
I don't think they ever failed to see the Zombocom problem or attempt to avoid it. Curating apps for security made since. However, it didn't see enough use for them to add lots more apps to their library.
Adding an easter egg command to your chat app is trivial. Actually making it good, stable, usable is not, especially if you prioritize easter eggs.
Slack has /shrug which isn't that far off.
Idk though, I stand by it. Any company that wanted a chat app could get slack or skype or teams instead, and they are backed by a big business who assures they're safe, come with desktop apps that have pop up notifications, and were quicker to boot up, and frankly are better.
And, personality or not, any app that was ported to Sandstorm you can still run off Sandstorm too.
The killer features are one single account for everything (ala Microsoft's suite which also has that), the potential for some very cool interoperability that never quite reached its full potential, and better security, which not enough people/companies were willing to sacrifice other desirable traits for, apparently.
I think NextCloud and OwnCloud are also bad examples, as in the beginning they started with the clear goal to replace Dropbox with a selfhosted alternative. Only later in live they become what they are now, so the original point still stands.