Issue #24: Rebel Yell

🎶 I walked the world for you, babe, a thousand miles with you… 🎶

Some news is just too loud to ignore. There are two N-metaframeworks which are foundational to the whole ecosystem and the latest news is somewhat common for both of them, or I’d rather say make them somewhat common with each other. OK, it’s getting too messed up without details. Let’s get down to business. And because it’s too controversial, I won’t put any labels this time and combine “the good” and “the bad”, as I honestly just don’t know…

The Good && The Bad

Right after I had announced the Metaframeworks Weekly feed for Bluesky, one of the vendors decided to stress-test it and post a huge opinion-provoking news in this metaframeworks-friendly social media (and elsewhere, of course).

Vercel announced that NuxtLabs, developers of Nuxt and Nitro, along with some other crucial parts of modern metaframeworks tooling, joined the company (developing the competing Next.js framework among other things). NuxtLabs website just got turned into a single announcement too.

There were lots of thoughts and laments and congrats and yells in social media about all of that, starting from praise addressed to Vercel and finishing with pleas to “not give up” to other frameworks.

Astro, is there a way to donate, and make sure you folks never end up needing to get bought by vercel?

(source)

What does it mean? Hardly anyone knows at this stage. One thing is important: the NuxtLabs guys are happy, and that means that’s already good. Otherwise, there can be some different points of view on that.

For instance, it’s good because:

• It means massive corporate investments into the Nuxt and Nitro development.
• It guarantees lower abandonment risks for all the tools in this box.
• It gives huge enterprise-grade testing grounds for the team.
• It provides possibilities for faster adoption of cutting-edge innovations in the ecosystem.
• It establishes better mutual ecosystem integrations for all (Nuxt with Turborepo? Why not… Next.js on Nitro? YOLO!).
• It lays down foundation for better support for developers using the framework.
• It helps to prevent potential burnout for open-source maintainers working with the ecosystem.

So it’s positive overall? Probably yes… But there can be CONs (Or, objectively, just worries? Who knows…) too, like:

• Corporate support improves funding but can dilute open-source values (“Rebellions are built on hope!”).
• Vercel prioritizes features that lock users into its platform (Vendor lock-in for optimizations? We saw that… Proprietary tools orientation? Why not…).
• The roadmap for Nuxt and Nitro can have some impact from the new owner’s side (Forced breaking changes? Why not, app router…).

So there’s no one common community opinion on that now, just lots of hopes and fears. But on this background, one positive starlight emerged bringing some good vibes and peace into the discourse — the retrospective on five years in Vercel from Lee Robinson. When you look at these nice words and nostalgic photos you want to believe that everything will be good. And who knows, maybe in the next five years Daniel Roe, in addition to his recent thoughts on the future of Nuxt, will write a retrospective about the positive changes Nuxt underwent with Vercel.

The Noteworthy

And while we’re breathing deeply waiting for other good news, there are some nice dive-ins into Astro (which still remains the most positive and scandal-neutral metaframework around), like these chronicles of Gatsby-to-Astro migration,

Gatsby is dead!

or this cool article full of excitement and betting on the tool whose name starts with the same letter as the word “Awesome”:

Astro is a developers f***ing dream!

Is such excitement always true? Not sure, and even the Nuxt example confirms that.

Are there other alternatives yet? For sure!

For instance, Siddharth Gelera has a lot of examples of that, but specifically, this recent tutorial with a lot of thoughtful ideas about metaframeworks, mechanics within them, and what can be done alternatively (simpler?) to solve the problems metaframeworks are targeted to solve. You can also check out the accompanying example template which takes Preact for a spin along with other slick tools. Funnily enough, the author’s other personal website, called barelyhuman.dev is built on Nuxt and returns a 500 error for some reason. Coincidence? Who knows… But maybe the author made their choice already…

So as you can see, it was quite a funny and interesting week. I hope that anyway, in my turn, in my five-year retrospective for writing for Metaframeworks Weekly, it won’t be all about Vercel because of some doomed inevitability or whatnot. It’s always good to have a choice. And if there’s nothing, go and create it.

Because you’re our only hope.

👋