What I Self Host

How come everything is "opinionated" these days, and since when has that become a compliment? I don't want software to have opinions, I want it to do what I tell it.

Write your own then, I guess. I prefer a developer to have at least some basic understanding of what they’re developing and why. And when they do, and when they themselves use their product, they do have opinions. In my opinion, especially if the project is open source, you’re free to do as you like.

I like opinionated software, because usually the developer uses the software themselves, and they prefer to not have some features you might like. I’m fine with that, if our opinions are similar. If not, I just might ignore that software, I guess. Sure thing, we cannot make all software opinionated, there’s no point in that. But some of it, I enjoy it to be that way.

> I don't want software to have opinions, I want it to do what I tell it.

What you tell it can be ambiguous or underspecified. "Opinionated" refers to the decisions the software makes so that you don't have to. Sometimes it also refers to having a default configuration that most users would find acceptable (but which can still be modified).

What this really means is that there are few configuration options, that it works mostly out of the box, and that it fits the tastes and needs of the developer. I can't really fault open source devs for that, it's a way to conserve resources. If I don't like something I go look elsewhere (or think about building my own then abandon the project in a git repo somewhere).

I agree. Good software should be configurable, not opinionated. It's fine to have defaults, but if you can't change the defaults to suit you then the software isn't very good.

>I want it to do what I tell it.

Me too, but writing software that does whatever user tells it to do, in a consistent and robust way, is very hard. Making it accessible and developing good UX for that kind of software is even harder. This is why a lot of heavily-customizable software, IMO, is so hard to use and maintain in the long run.

On the other hand, if the developer, who is by definition immersed in the domain, can use their experience to make good decisions and enforce them with limitations, the resulting software has a higher chance to be easier to use and easier to maintain.

I tend to gravitate towards "opinionated" software with very limited customizability because in my experience that kind of software is of better quality, on average.

Yeah it's more of a disclaimer than a sales pitch.

Came out of nodejs part of the world from what I can tell and spread

Compliment in that it’s supposed to mean something akin to principled I guess