CSS-Tricks in Limbo
267 points by edent 2 days ago | 136 comments
  • owebmaster 2 days ago |
    That's what going to happen to tailwind too after the acquisition.
    • EspadaV9 2 days ago |
      Has Shopify given money to Omarchy too? Or more so because now Tailwind is owned by someone larger?
      • sevenseacat 2 days ago |
        Tobi and DHH are like BFFs, and yes, they have.

        https://omarchy.org/news/2026/08/omacom-foundation-launches-... Founding member, donating a million dollars.

        • ActionHank 2 days ago |
          Gotta say, given the list of security issues that continue to be found in Omarchy, if I were an enterprising explorer, I'd be probing for shopify employees running Omarchy.
    • threetonesun 2 days ago |
      Tailwind is basically already EOL in its functional inability to support newer CSS features. Both of these projects seemed like the creator being fine with getting out with a nice paycheck, and that's ok by me, although it's unfortunate DO lied about how it would handle CSS Tricks going forward, and generally abandoned the tech writing aspect it was initially known for.
  • micromacrofoot 2 days ago |
    what are people using instead of digital ocean now?
    • jordanscales 2 days ago |
      Hetzner
    • spiderfarmer 2 days ago |
      Hetzner. I like the company and how they operate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQeJYEN_lrg

      Plus, it's an EU company. I don't want to rely on US hosting for my business.

    • recov 2 days ago |
      I switched over to vultr months ago, so far so good!
    • rpastuszak 2 days ago |
      Hetzner + Coolify + BunnyCDN for the entire stack

      I'm moving off Vercel / AWS. I kept DO for a Minecraft server for friends/family but that's dead.

      • Diti 2 days ago |
        I use Hetzner and Bunny too. What does Coolify do in this instance?
        • tancop 2 days ago |
          It's basically an app store and service manager for self hosting. You can deploy databases, auth providers, Git forges, a static site, anything you want with one click in a nice web UI. Hetzner only gives you a base Linux install and everyone knows setting up Docker from scratch is a pain.
        • VPenkov 2 days ago |
          Github-to-production or similar autodeploy workflows, cert management, backups, monitoring, notifications, and other things.

          Coolify's website [1] explains it better.

          But for example, you can call a webhook once new resources have been created, so Coolify can push them to your CDN.

          [1] https://coolify.io/

  • draw_down 2 days ago |
    I would have been okay with this state of affairs if the Omarchy guy had good politics. But he has the bad politics so I’m outraged.
    • throwy99864 2 days ago |
      It’s really interesting tbf how you felt like defending a racist piece of shit by publicizing you view the world with less complexity than a toddler
  • Theodores 2 days ago |
    Almost all magazines go though an arc of success, plateau and decline. Audiences and writers move on or retire.

    I very much like and use CSS-Tricks, however, in itself it reflects a somewhat dated frontend design process and rarely uses any CSS tricks to clothe the Wordpress core that enforces dated design processes.

  • account42 2 days ago |
    Complaining that they give money to people you don't like is not a good look when you want them to give money to people you do like.
    • prinny_ 2 days ago |
      I think it’s a very good look when the people you complain about are racists.
      • simianparrot a day ago |
        The racist accusation has been overused so much it's not just having diminishing returns, it's having no effect. If you can't argue someone's point but just throw labels at them, you are going to lose because the labels lose value the more broadly you apply them.

        And that will allow the real racists to walk right through your gates because you can no longer identify them when everyone you don't like is a racist.

        • malmz a day ago |
          This is the real racist, walking through the gate.
        • jakelazaroff a day ago |
          The label pretty obviously fits in this case though? No one is calling DHH racist as some sort of slur; they're just describing his system of beliefs.
    • blactuary 2 days ago |
      "People you don't like" is a great euphemism for racists
    • boredpudding 2 days ago |
      Because being friendly works doesn't work. Open source maintainers have been screaming about funding for years. One dude comes along, adds some scripts on top of all the work of those maintainers, and gets millions in funding?

      You can't expect people to be nice then. It's completely messed up.

      • oefrha 2 days ago |
        In this case CSS-Tricks got paid $4m first, so probably the wrong entity to be complaining about funding. But maybe the lead editor in question who’s not the creator didn’t see much of that?
        • boredpudding 2 days ago |
          CSS-Tricks didn't get paid $4m. They got acquired. The previous owner of CSS-Tricks got $4m.
          • oefrha 2 days ago |
            Got acquired => got paid. CSS-Tricks the entity (up to the point of acquisition) got paid the money. If and how the money was divided between the people involved doesn’t seem be public info.
            • geoffgraham 2 days ago |
              It wasn't divided.
      • danieljacksonno 2 days ago |
        "One dude" that has been one of the lead and most well known contributors to open source for decades now.
        • bastawhiz 2 days ago |
          If Linus Torvalds published it I don't think that would make it worth throwing millions of dollars at. When you stop paying for one thing and start paying for another, you're making a value statement about what you care about.
      • soundnote 20 hours ago |
        Framework tried contributing money to GNOME recently. Sadly they also contributed some to Hyprland and Omarchy. As a result, Jordan Petridis / Alatiera of GNOME said they must "contain Hitler particles" to even consider sponsoring... a window manager and a Linux distro.

        GNOME declined the money.

        Framework also offered money to KDE. KDE accepted the money.

        Framework released a computer that ran Fedora KDE: Freedesktop.org Code of Conduct committee member starts crying about the fascism of it.

        Later, when DHH got the Omacom foundation's money pledges in, he contacted Arch/AUR people to see about sending some money or resources their way. They declined.

        Some reactions on Mastodon to the Omacom announcements:

        PostmarketOS dev: "nothing quite as depressing as seeing a fascist get 8 mil and corpo backing to keep building their 'distro' while not even having the funds to hire folks to work full time.

        Elementary OS dev to that: "yeah it seems the trick to financial success is to do as much harm as possible"

        And they go on to compare Omarchy to servants of the Chaos God Khorne in Warhammer. You know, a god of bloodshed and warfare. Blood for the Blood God, Skulls to the Skull Throne.

        Meanwhile, eg. everything I've ever seen of Vaxry has been orders of magnitude more normal than raving about Hitler particles, and somehow he has a multiyear sponsorship to work on Hyprland fulltime, the maker of Quickshell got hired by Omacom, and some other projects they use have received sponsorships. Only Arch declined.

        > One dude comes along, adds some scripts on top of all the work of those maintainers, and gets millions in funding?

        Said guy moved most of his own company to that distro, and he and his business partner each put down a million dollars of their own money. Just a while ago, when the foundation paperwork wasn't done yet, DHH said the Vaxry and outfoxxed sponsorships came out of his pocket in case there was a snag with setting up the foundation.

        > You can't expect people to be nice then. It's completely messed up.

        People seem to have been capable of not shouting about Hitler particles, and somehow it's those people who've been sponsored now that one dude managed to scrounge up serious money. Funny, that.

    • mb_thd 2 days ago |
      "people you do like" in this case refers to a website that DigitalOcean owns. "people you don't like" is a singular (racist) guy who slapped a bunch of scripts on top of Arch and somehow receives hundreds of thousands of dollars for it.
    • benatkin 2 days ago |
      In this case you can judge for yourself if it's an overreaction. https://world.hey.com/dhh/wolves-sheep-and-gypsies-ba44af6a
      • dallen33 2 days ago |
        Holy shit, that blog post was insane. He's clearly a racist twat.
      • taikahessu 2 days ago |
        Wow. You can make your own conclusions, but my money is not exactly going to flow into DigitalOcean's pocket in the near future.
  • ewy1 2 days ago |
    the title is really underselling it; as the post is very concise, i won't repeat it here but it's worth reading
  • rkeswick 2 days ago |
    The writing quality definitely dropped after the acquisition. It's a shame, CSS-Tricks taught me so much early on.
    • CM30 2 days ago |
      It really lost something when Chris Coyier stopped writing for it. He just had a way of writing fun and approachable tutorials for this stuff, and the other contributors didn't hit the same style.

      (no shade to Geoff Graham, he did good work as well)

  • sintaxi 2 days ago |
    Wow, Omarchy is hot right now. Great to see all these companies contributing to a future with Linux on desktop. Good on Digital Ocean for making such a substantial commitment.

    It would be a shame if css-tricks went offline after all these years. I can understand it winding down now that we are in the age of agents but I hope to see it preserved in some way so it stays online for a very long time.

    • lgl 2 days ago |
      > Great to see all these companies contributing to a future with Linux on desktop.

      I'm thinking they're merely riding the free publicity wave. Who, in their right mind, would contribute to the super narrow definition of linux desktop preached by DHH?

      Was "being agentic" and "being keyboard shortcut oriented" the big gaps preventing the adoption of linux on desktop?

      I honestly fail to see why everybody is so convinced that the linux desktop will be "saved" by Omarchy, a set of scripts specifically designed to mostly satisfy a narrow slice of power users and developers.

      Also, sponsoring a multi-millionaire's AI generated side project to the sum of many millions of dollars instead of contributing to the dozens or hundreds of thankless developers that have built and maintained most of the current linux ecosystem is pretty disgusting imho.

      • zorobo 2 days ago |
        > Was "being agentic" and "being keyboard shortcut oriented" the big gaps preventing the adoption of linux on desktop?

        Of course not but dhh makes it clear omarchy is not for everybody. And that’s all right.

    • otherme123 2 days ago |
      Omarchy is a highly opinionated distro. For example I remember DHH falling in love with alacritty a few minutes after switching from being a Mac hardcore user-evangelist (Mac users were furious in Twitter!). Now alacritty is in Omarchy as one of the four terminals available.

      This is to say that Omarchy is not Linux. Is a very particular vision of Linux that lots of people won't like. Funding should go to projects near the foundation of Linux (say Gnome or Kde or alacritty itself), not to some random re-packager known for having strong and radical takes that might swing without previous notice. DHH is perfectly able to wake up tomorrow saying "fuck Linux, fuck Omarchy, the future is Windows".

  • est 2 days ago |
    Perhaps just make it open source and static host it
    • bastawhiz 2 days ago |
      You're arguing to kill it, effectively. It's been being published to up until this month
  • wg0 2 days ago |
    I am concerned that what will happen to detailed technical write ups that defined much of the "technical internet space"? There used to be "CodeProject" (still is around probably) that used to have great articles on C, Windows Programming, Windows System programming and what not. Similar other sources on Web as well such as some TutPlus network.

    Now with LLMs, they won't gain attention and all knowledge would be stuck in LLMs but there would be no knowledge base to train the LLMs on so... would this all collapse in a decade or two?

    PS: Not anti AI rant, just a genuine open question.

    • phoghed 2 days ago |
      > it's not just an anti AI rant, it's a genuine open question

      There will probably still be some passionate people dedicated to this kind of thing, but presumably not as many, which is unfortunate.

    • judah 2 days ago |
      FYI, CodeProject.com appears to have been shut down a few months ago. I used to visit (and contribute) to the site regularly through articles and Q&A answers. When StackOverflow took over, I moved most of my Q&A answers there, and I suspect many others did too.

      The site languished until a few months ago when it started serving a blank page. Now it appears totally offline. ;-(

      • piskov 2 days ago |
        Went to readonly mode in 2024
    • autoexec 2 days ago |
      > Now with LLMs, they won't gain attention and all knowledge would be stuck in LLMs but there would be no knowledge base to train the LLMs on so...

      It's even worse, the internet is getting filled with AI generated slop. All that knowledge stuck in LLMs gets regurgitated out with random errors scattered into it. A few cycles of AI having to scrape and ingest its own slop and it's going to get very ugly.

    • nicbou 4 hours ago |
      I am feeling it pretty hard. My work is as important as ever, but my traffic is down 75%. I am competing with LLM slop, with the search engine itself, and with LLM agents that paraphrase my work.

      The worst part is that they're not replacing me! I'm still the one going out there, networking, asking questions and writing about what I find. Just so that their bots can hammer my website and use my work to metastasize faster.

      Fucking parasites, the whole lot of 'em.

      I will probably survive, but so many websites won't. Even if they do, they might drown in the noise of the torment nexus.

  • wiesson 2 days ago |
    Can’t the site be migrated to Astro/static and be hosted on CF/Vercel? It could be a great resource for LLMs
    • malmz a day ago |
      It is a great resource for humans.
  • timedude 2 days ago |
    Aren't all Linux distros ultimately a bunch of scripts on top of the Linux kernel? Compiled scripts, but scripts none the less. If someone made a bash compiler maybe that would help. Reminds me of when I used to compile DOS batch files to .com executables back in the day to make my work look more important lol
  • ChiperSoft 2 days ago |
    The more relevant post is by Geoff himself.

    https://geoffgraham.me/why-css-tricks-has-been-quiet/

    • willio58 2 days ago |
      I mean, that post says basically nothing of substance, compared to the post linked by OP.

      That said, this is a sad situation. If I’m reading this right, essentially digital ocean has just stopped paying the main contributor to css tricks for no clear reason.

      • ChiperSoft a day ago |
        I feel like the second to last paragraph says a LOT, quite succinctly, but maybe I'm better at reading between the lines.
  • bsimpson 2 days ago |
    TIL Chris Coyier sold CSS Tricks in 2022.
  • woodpanel 2 days ago |
    Immediate Tab-Closing when the author can't finish even half of an CSS article without ranting about evil conservatives ("far-right racist infamy").
  • soundnote 2 days ago |
    > Apparently it is a more pressing matter for them to donate to a collection of scripts and configuration files than to contribute to the projects they’re built upon

    The dismissive disingenuousness is tiresome. Omarchy hasn't been a set of dotfiles in a long time, and the money has gone to upstream projects - vaxry got paid to be able to dev Hyprland fulltime for up to five years, outfoxxed who makes Quickshell got hired, they sponsored the developer of mise, and hired a kernel developer.

  • kellengreen 2 days ago |
    Why purchase a website, just to run it into the ground? I never understood this.
    • m3h 2 days ago |
      COVID happened. Money was aplenty. Then snapback happened. And there were many firings and cancelled projects.

      There were a lot of products and ideas that felt great during ZIRP but stopped making sense post-ZIRP. That's my take.

    • ygouzerh a day ago |
      Often politics, lack of vision, people being shuffled around, etc (e.g the stakeholder that decided of the acquisition just got moved to an another department, this kind of things)
  • bilater 2 days ago |
    Tbh I can't see how any site about tooling doesn't go the way of Stack Overflow. I used to follow the latest framework and CSS articles avidly. With agents it's a moot point.

    It's sad. But rather than fight it, we should be thinking about what communities we form next, in a world where knowing flexbox tricks isn't a flex.

    • AlienRobot 2 days ago |
      That's because those AI's were trained on existing "CSS tricks."

      If people stop writing new CSS tricks, they will never make it into any dataset, and it won't matter if the AI can search the internet or not, because they won't be posted on the internet either.

      Essentially, mass scraping has a chilling effect.

      • bilater 2 days ago |
        I think this assumes AI needs the same kinds of “tricks” humans do.

        Flexbox, CSS Grid, etc. are mostly abstractions that make low-level DOM/layout control tractable for humans. But from first principles, an agent doesn’t really care whether the interface is elegant. If it can reliably manipulate the underlying system directly and verify the rendered output, it can just write whatever low-level code gets the pixels where they need to go.

        So I don’t really buy that there’s some big missing abstraction layer left to invent for AI here. Once the agent can control and verify the underlying output, better human-facing wrappers mostly stop mattering.

        Not talking about design trends, just the mechanics of producing the UI.

        • malmz a day ago |
          What low level code would that be? Position every element manually with JS and position: absolute? Flex and grid are the low level layout mechanics used for any responsive webapp. Even most native frameworks use the flexbox model.
          • bilater a day ago |
            no you still probably use layout algos but most variation on top of them in css is human preference v capability (Extra HTML Elements v Pseudo Elements etc).
      • abirch 2 days ago |
        Oddly enough if the scraping is good, AI can find the CSS tricks in the wild. Not as applicable with other technologies but scrapable web is readable for AI much like how some of us old people learned html/css by looking at source of quality websites.
    • veqq 2 days ago |
      https://janetdocs.org/ is growing pretty fast, but that's because the community's forging an anti-AI niche of fun hobby coding.
  • droptablemain 2 days ago |
    Is this an article about CSS-Tricks or a hit piece on DHH? Hard to tell.
    • dallen33 2 days ago |
      It's both. Fuck DHH.
  • jarek83 2 days ago |
    Getting linux to work flawlessly on M Macs is "just a bunch of scripts"? Wow. Since when tech folks judge the open-source projects so harsh and so much just after they only started?
    • legobmw99 2 days ago |
      On the off chance this isn't just trolling: Getting linux to work on M-series Macs was a ton of work and basically none of it was done by the folks behind Omarchy. Exactly the point being made in this argument and elsewhere is that the funding would be better off going to the people who really did the hard parts of that work (e.g. Ashai developers among others)
      • jarek83 a day ago |
        You might be missing most recent tweets, where there is ton of progress from omarchy team in this area. Also they have a dedicated team now working full time just on that.
      • soundnote 18 hours ago |
        Omarchy went and sponsored vaxry so he's able to work on Hyprland full time for 3+2 years, hired Quickshell creator outfoxxed and a kernel developer, sponsored upstream projects like mise, and tried to offer resources to Arch/AUR, who refused them.

        And like the other poster said, they are actively working on M series support (building on Asahi's excellent work, of course) and making concrete progress.