Tech entrepreneur. Founder @electricsql. Founder @gatsbyjs (acquired by Netlify). @kylemathews on Twitter

I feel like I’ve never really grokked static site generators despite chatting a lot with @kam (of Gatsby fame) about them. They now seem like a ecosystem that’s *more* complex than WordPress. But what’s the essence of them, the way “chronological web log + rss” was it for WP &co? https://jamstack.org/generators/

Blogger at ribbonfarm.com, running summerofprotocols.com, host of /gloom ☀️

I think classic disruption theory explains it pretty well. Who's under or over-served by WP? Many programmers are over-served as they want a language/ecosystem they're familiar with (Node.js) and just want md vs. a full-blown admin/editing interface.

the problem with all this is that there's been no cohering really of the growing ecosystem around common substrates. That was/is Gatsby's goal but we never got quite enough market power or functionality to become the standard.

To make a reasonably good analogy — WP is the Windows OS of online media and Jamstack is trying, sort of, to be the internet OS equivalent. But so far it's just a loose community of practice vs. reliable infrastructure.

so projects that are legitimate engineering projects thrive in this world (teams often tell us they're 2-3x faster than w/ WP) but if you're building a fairly commodity site, it's far cheaper/faster to stick with WP.

under-served are people who want high-end sites (very fast, lots of customizations, etc.) or the many enterprises adopting headless CMSs so they can serve unified content to many frontends (websites, mobile apps, etc.)