Which communication protocol or open standard in software do you wish was more common or used more?
Whether you're really passionate about RPC, MQTT, Matrix or wayland, tell us more about the protocols or open standards you have strong opinions on!
Markdown. Its only in tech-spaces that its preferred, but it should be used everywhere. You can even write full books and academic papers in markdown (maybe with only a few extensions like latex / mathjax).
Instead, in a lot of fields, people are passing around variants of microsoft word documents with weird formatting and no standardization around headings, quotes, and comments.
Man, I've written three novels plus assorted shorter form stories in markdown.
There's a learning curve, but once you get going, it's so fluid. The problem is that when it comes time to format for release, you have to convert to something else, and not every word processor can handle markdown. It's extra work, but worth it, imo.
Depends on the type of book. Since you need HTML for all non default styles. Therefore, it raises the bar... you need a bit of web dev knowledge which removes the biggest benefit of markdown: simplicity / ease of use.
I think Obsidian and Logseq are helping to change this.
I frigging love markdown for everything!
IPv6. Lack of IPv4 addresses it's a problem, specially in poorer countries. But still lots of servers and ISPs don't support it natively. And what is worse. Lots of sysadmins don't want to learn it.
Am sysadmin, can confirm I don't wanna learn it.
My university recently had Internet problems, where the DHCP only leased Out iov6 addresses. For two days, we could all see which sites implemented iov6 and which didn't.
Many big corpo sites like GitHub or discord Apperently don't. Small stuff like my personal website or https://suikagame.com do.
github is so stupid with that, it's actually funny
Say this to my very large Canadian ISP who still doesn’t support IPv6 for residential customers. Last I checked, adoption in Canada was still under 50%.
Lots of really large sites are horribly misconfigured. I had intermittent issues because one of the edge hosts in Netflix ‘s round robin dns did not do MTU discovery properly.
I'm stupid, can you elaborate a little further about how ipv6 would make becoming an ISP easier?
Unified Push.
Unbelievable that we have to rely on Google and co for sth as essential as push messages! Even among the open source community, the adoption is surprisingly limited.
Nobody knows about unifiedpush. Last time I checked, their Linux dbus distributor also wasn't ready. There has to be a unified push to get it adopted.
Fuck Unified Push. Just use the Web Push standard. https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8030
It is what is used for browser push messages, is already widely supported. Is compatible with existing push infrastructure and users and is end-to-end encrypted. IDK why Unified Push felt the need to create a new protocol when a perfectly good one already existed.
Although there is no "client side" spec. The Unified Push client side could be useful. But they should throw away their custom backend protocol and just use Web Push.
IPv6
I mean, why the hell is IPv4 still a thing??
Because ipv6 is yucky
Try to remember a handful of them
In the world of computers, why would remembering numbers be the stop for new technologies?
Do you remember anyone's public key? Certificate?
I don't even remember domain (most) names, just Google them or save them as bookmarks or something.
The reason IPv4 still exists is because ISPs benefit from its scarcity. Big ISPs already paid a lot of money to own IPv4 addresses, if they switched to IPv6 that investnywould be worthless.
Try selling static IPv6 addresses as they do now with IPv4. People would laugh at them and just get a free IPv6 address from an ISP that wants to get new users and doesn't charge for it.
The longer ISPs delay the adoption of IPv6, the longer they can milk IPv4 scarcity.
RSS (RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) It is in use a fair amount, but it is usually buried. Many people don't know it exists and because of that I am afraid it will one day go away.
I find it a great simple way to stay up to date across multiple web sites the way I want to (on my terms, not theirs) By the way, it works on Lemmy to :)
XMPP
Call me old fashioned, but I still call it Jabber.
I came here to say matrix but I'm not gonna lie. If XMPP had gotten the traction it deserved we wouldn't need matrix.
Why not matrix?
You're going off-topic from the OP question :-) But to answer your new question : I do not trust Matrix enough when it comes to privacy. I know that this link is old but still. https://disroot.org/en/blog/matrix-closure
Then again I do not trust Signal that much either but sometimes compromises need to be made to get things done. With XMPP the end user can host their own server if they wish to, without meta data going to a centralized point. And video calls via XMPP and Conversations were a pleasure to use when I used it during the Covid-19 pandemic.
odf/odt/ods
.md
SimpleX
Matrix
OpenPGP
Last, certainly not least... ActivityPub
Markdown really should have more widespread support than it does. It's just the right mix between plain text and an office document, I took my college notes with it in fact cause of how fast it was to format stuff. But as far as I know, there's no default program on any of the (major) OS's or Distros for viewing it.
Maybe it's just due to a lack of standards for formatting or something, but regardless I do wish it was used and supported more.
LaTeX. As someone in academia, I absolutely love it. It has some issues like package incompatibility, but it's far far better than anything else I've used. It's basically ubiquitous in academia, and I wish it were the case everywhere else as well.
Is it practical outside of academia? I heard the learning curve is kinda big
Nope and yep. It's an incredible tool, but it's got a vim-sized learning curve to really leverage it plus other significant drawbacks. Still my beloved one-and-only when I can get away with it, but its a bit of a masochistic acquired taste for sure.
Template tweaking, as I imagine academia heavily relies on, is really the closest to practical it gets. You do still get beautiful results, it's just hard to express yourself arbitrarily without really committing to the bit.
I wrote my masters in LaTeX and while I appreciate the structuredness and the fact I could use vim, it was so quirky. Having to spend half an hour to fix a non obvious compile error, more than once, was a big distractor. I'm sure it gets better when you use it more but I don't think I have ever used it since. I'm not in academia and I don't need to solve compile problems when creating an invoice or writing a letter to local government.
What about Typst?
The Typst compiler is open source. It is the open core of the web app and we will develop and maintain it in cooperation with the community
Try Typst now!
Create a free account to join the public beta.
Beta software marketing with "free accounts" and an open core compiler for a (probably) future paid web service tells me all I need to know.
Even though LaTeX has issues, not being an online service is not one of them.
I was actually surprised to find out QUIC is fairly close to being default.
Wikipedia
HTTP/3 uses QUIC, a multiplexed transport protocol built on UDP.
HTTP/3 is (at least partially) supported by 97% of tracked web browser installations (thereof of 98% of "tracked mobile" web browsers), and 29% of the top 10 million websites.
I wish Microsoft Office would use the .odf standard by default. Or, failing that, it'd implement its own published .docx specification correctly, so other office suites can be compatible.
That'd be nice of course. Personally, I just wish everything Microsoft would wither and go away.
The entire purpose of Microsoft standardizing OOXML and implementing it wrongly in Office was to make other office suites irrelevant. ODF was already standardized and countries would have adopted it if MS didn't do the same with OOXML. They stuffed the ISO with members supporting them to do it.
And now that OOXML is a viable standard, they implement it wrongly so that other office suites can't be compatible with MS Office without a lot of extra effort. Any incompatibilities with MS Office will be considered as the fault of other office suites by the general public and government officials.
Expecting MS to do what's right for the customers is putting too much faith in their nonexistent sense of ethics.
Others have said already, but XMPP and RSS. Also, nobody mentioned NNTP yet.
I wish everything was accessible by NNTP and we had better NNTP clients. NNTP is like RSS but for forums (so, Lemmy, Reddit, or anything where you could reply to posts). Download for offline reading, read in your client, define your own formatting, sorting, filtering, your client, your rules.
If Lemmy was accessible via NNTP, I could just download all posts and comments I'm interested in and reply to them without any connection, and my replies would get synced with the server later when I connect to WiFi or something.
IOT devices shouldn't connect to wifi. ZWave or zigbee is much better suited to IOT stuff, but it seems to mostly get adopted in very limited, locked down proprietary shit like Hue Lights.
Isn't Matter supposed to solve this issue?
pee to peer, i would be happier thitking that every time i open somo application, i'm helping it, like i2p
🤨
I wish people used email for chat more. SMTP is actually a pretty great protocol for real time communication. People think of it as this old slow protocol, but that’s mostly because the big email providers make it slow. Gmail, by default, waits ten seconds before it even tries to send your message to the recipient’s server. And even then, most of them do a ridiculous amount of processing on your messages that it usually takes several seconds from the time it receives a message to the time it shows up in your account.
There’s a project called Delta Chat that makes email look and act like a chat app. If you have a competent email service, I think it’s better than texting. It doesn’t stomp on the images you send like SMS and Facebook do, everyone has it unlike all the proprietary services, and you can run your own server for it that interacts with everyone else’s servers.
Unfortunately, Google, Microsoft, etc all block you if you try to run your own server “to protect against spam”. Really, I’m convinced that’s just anticompetitive behavior. The fewer players are allowed to enter the email market, the less competition Gmail and Outlook will have.
As much as I like ProtonMail too, unfortunately their encryption models prevents it from working with Delta Chat. I’d love to see Proton make a compatible chat app that works with their service.
I made an email service called Port87 that I’m working on making compatible with Delta chat too. I’d love to see people using email the way it was originally meant to be used, to talk to each other, without being controlled by big businesses.
Oh, another awesome thing about email is that you can ensure that your address is always yours, even if you use an email service provider like Gmail. Any provider that supports custom domains will allow you to use your own domain for your address, then if you want to change your provider, you keep your address. So, since I own hperrin.com, I can use the address me@hperrin.com, and I know it’ll always be mine as long as I pay for that domain.
This is a much better model than anything else. Even on the fediverse, you can’t have your own address unless you run your own instance.
If your email service provider goes out of business or gets sold off (skiff.com, anyone?), as long as you’re on your own custom domain, your address is still yours.
I’m working on custom domains for Port87. It’s definitely a feature I think every email provider should offer.
i2p. It's sorta like Tor, but the way that every user is a node provides some advantages over Tor.
TeX. I was able to use it during school for some beautiful type setting and formatting but nobody I work with wants to use anything other than plain text or unfortunately more commonly binary wysiwyg editor formats. It's frustrating and ugly.
One way I do TeX now is a few templates (letter, memo, etc) and circulate files in PDF.
If you must use Word to circulate files, consider Pandoc as a way to get them out.
Honestly, IRC was a very functional, easy, free, low-resource and privacy friendly chat protocol and I don't really see why it got left behind. If you wanted image/ file support that could really be implemented client and/or server side.
I2P. Current protocols should go through it
i2p is pretty cool. One of the more interesting projects out there. Like tor, though i'm preferential to the weird ones.
there is also GNUNET which seems to be in perpetual development, perhaps one day that will see something interesting happen.
Anonymous lemmy, anonymous torrents, anonymous IPFS, anonymous eMule, anonymous streaming, anonymous source forges, anonymous chats, anonymous everything...
Imagine unbridled, anonymous, mainstream piracy, software development, sitehosting, communication, social media.
Matrix... it's on such a good path I can't complain. Adoption could be faster but it's alright.
I2p, although I have no idea if the lack of adoption has not a very good reason.
I love i2p. I wish it had more adoption / was easier to use.
I'd love to see more adoption of... I2C!
Bazillions of motherboards and SBCs support I2C and many have the ability to use it via GPIO pins or even have connectors just for I2C devices (e.g. QWIIC). Yet there's very little in the way of things you can buy and plug in. It feels like such a waste!
There's all sorts of neat and useful things we could plug in and make use of if only there were software to use it. For example, cheap color sensors, nifty gesture sensors, time-of-flight sensors, light sensors, and more.
There's lmsensors which knows I2C and can magically understand zillions of temperature sensors and PWM things (e.g. fan control). We need something like that for all those cool devices and chips that speak I2C.
I2C is a bit goofy though. As a byproduct of being an undiscoverable bus you basically just have to poke random addresses and guess what you're talking to. The fact lmsensors i2c detection works as well as it does is a miracle. (Plus you get the neat issue where even the act of scanning the bus can accidentally reconfigure endpoints)
If you have an unused VGA port, you can use the DDC pins for I2C. Be sure to add ESD protection if you do this. An I2C isolator would be even better.
I2C is really not meant to be used over cables. It has a very limited common mode input voltage range and it can't handle much capacitance on the bus.
I've been playing with MQTT on meshtastic. I really hope LoRa and meshtastic continue to grow.
I wish the protocol used by Hotline Client took off, it was basically Discord in the 90s with its support for announcement/news posts and file sharing
XMPP
Why is that preferable over Matrix?
Matrix came 15 years after XMPP, so the question should be: why is Matrix preferable? Does it bring anything to the table, other than fragmentation?
IPFS I'm really glad things like nerdctl and guix support it, but I wish more things too advantage of the p2p filesystem.
Petals.Dev and hivemind ml P2P AI inference and training seem like the only true viable options to make foundational models that are owned soley by authoritarian government s and megacorps.
Matrix for federated general real time communication. (Not justs chat, video, images, but just data, with third room being on the cooler demos for what is possible)
Activity Pub for asynchronous communication between servers. The socialmedia aspect is obviously the focus and the most mature, but I'm also excited for things like Forgejo (Codeberg.org) and Gitlab's support.
I am also excited for QUIC for increased privacy of metadata and reduction of network trips.
The problem with IPFS is that kubo sucks. I used it for a while and it is always burning CPU doing nothing, failing to publish anything to the DHT and fetching files is slow. GC collects files that are supposed to be "pinned" by existing in MFS and so many other bugs all of the time.
I would love to see a new server take off that was built with quality in mind.
I think the core protocol is pretty good (although I think they should have baked in encryption) but even the mid-level protocols like UnixFS and DAG whatever are mired in constant change for no real reason as the developers jump on new fads.
Slow and requires additional tooling to run normally. Just not a lot of development on the core pieces tbh. Wasm support for example could make deployments way simpler (implement an ipfs proxy in any browser or server that supports wasm) but the ticket for that kind of died off. There is a typescript implementation, helia, that I haven't checked out yet.
We are honestly kind of in a decentralization winter again, with ActivityPub being one of the few survivors gaining traction from what it seems. OpenSource luckily doesn't just up and die like that, so I still have hope for some next spring.
i wish all the big players would agree on one of the many open chat and IM protocols. it's like kindergarten where the toddlers don't want to share toys
Was it really back in 2009 that both Google and Facebook used XMPP compatible chats? Those were the days.
xmpp (jabber)
Since they meet at least one of,
if not all of the following:
Uds, shm, fuse for ipc. Ini for configs.
Stream Control Transmission Protocol. It’s the Betamax of low level networking.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stream_Control_Transmission_Protocol
FTP
Seriously guys, let's share files the old fashioned way. Without bullshit.
I'd like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as FTP is, in fact, smelly hot garbage.
For context, I wrote this while waiting for a migraine to pass. I was angry at my brain for ruining my morning, and I like to shit on FTP. It's fun to be hyperbolic. I don't intend for this to be an attack on you, I was just bored and decided to write this ridiculous rant to pass the time.
I must once again rant about FTP. I've no idea if you're serious about liking it or you're just taking the piss, but seeing those three letters surrounded by whitespace reminds me of all the bad things in the world.
FTP is, as I've said, smelly hot garbage, and the infrastructure built to support FTP is even worse. Why? Well, one reason is that FTP has the most idiotic networking model conceivable. To see how crazy it is, let's compare to a more sane protocol, like HTTP (for simplicity's sake, I'll do HTTP/1.1). First, you get the underlying transport protocol stuff and probably SSL. The HTTP client opens a connection from some local ephemeral port to the destination server on port 80/443/whatever and does all the normal protocol things (so syn-synack-ack and Client Hello - Server Hello+server cert - client kex+change cipher - change cipher - encrypted data). FTP does TCP too! Same same so far (minus SSL, unless you're using FTPS). Next, the HTTP client goes like this:
GET /index.html HTTP/1.1
Host: www.whatever.the.fuck
# a bunch of other headers
and you know what fucking happens here? The fucking server responds with the data and a response code on the same goddamn TCP connection. You get a big, glorious response over the nice connection you established:
200 OK
# a bunch of headers and shit
HERE'S YOUR DAMN DATA NERD
So that's nice, and the client you're using to read this used that flow (or an evolution of that flow if you're using HTTP/2 or HTTP/3). So what does FTP do? It does one of two really stupid things depending on whether you're using active or passive mode. Active mode is the default for the protocol (although not the default for most clients), so let's analyze that! First, your FTP client initiates a TCP connection to your server on port 21 (by default), and then the server just sends this:
<--- 220 Rebex FTP Server ready.
ok, that kinda came out of nowhere. You're probably using a modern client that saves you from all of the godawful footguns, so it then asks the server what it supports:
---> FEAT
<--- 211-Supported extensions:
<--- AUTH TLS;SSL;
<--- CDUP
<--- CLNT
# A whole bunch of other 4 letter acronyms. If I was writing an FTP server, I'd make it swear at the user since there are a lot of fun 4 letter words
There's some other bullshit we don't care about right now, although highlights include sending the username and password in plain text. There's also ASCII vs binary mode. WE'LL GET BACK TO THAT. :|
So then we want to do a LIST. You know what happens in active mode? Your computer opens up some random fucking TCP port. It then instructs the FTP server to CONNECT TO YOUR GODDAMN COMPUTER. Your computer is the server, and the other side is now the client. I would post a more detailed overview of the FTP commands, but most servers on the internet disable active mode because it's a goddamn liability. All of the sudden, your computer has to be internet facing with open firewall ports, and that's just a whole heap of shit.
I'm probably not blowing many minds right now because people know about this shit. I just want to mention that this is how FTP was built. The data plane and control plane are separate, and back in 19XX when this shit was invented, you could trust your fellows on ARPANET and NAT didn't exist and sure HAM radio operators here's the entire goddamn 44.0.0.0/8 block for you to do packet switched radio. A simple protocol for simple times, back before we knew what was good and what was bad.
So, active mode sucks! PASV is the future, and is the default on basically all modern clients and servers! Passive mode works exactly the same as the above, except when the client goes to LIST, the server opens some random TCP port (I've often seen something like 44000-44010) and tells the client, "hey you, connect to 1.2.3.4:44000 to get you your tasty data." Sounds great, right? Well, there's a problem that I actually touched on in my last paragraph. Back when this dogshit was first squeezed out in the 70s, everyone had a public address. There were SO MANY addresses! 4 billion addresses? We'll never use all of those! That is clearly not the case anymore. We don't have enough addresses, and now we have this wonderful thing called NAT.
Continued in part 2.
PART 2.
NAT, much like the city of Phoenix, is a monument to man's arrogance. Fuck NAT and fuck FTP. If your FTP server is listening directly on a public IP address hooked up directly to a proper router, then none of this applies. If you're anything like me, the last company I worked for (a small startup), or my current company (many many thousands of employees making software you know and may or may not hate, making many billions of dollars a year), then the majority of your servers are living in RFC1918 space. Traffic from the internet is making it to them via NAT (or NAT with extra steps, i.e. L4 load balancers).
A request comes in for $PUBLICIP TCP port 21 and is forwarded to your failure of a boxen at 10.0.54.187. Your FTP server is a big stupid idiot and doesn't know this. It thinks that it's king shit and has its own public IP address. Therefore, when it's deciding what ADDR:PORT it's going to tell the stupid FTP client to connect to, it just looks at one of the adapters on the box and says "oh, I'll tell this client on the internet to connect to 10.0.54.187:44007" and then I fucking cry. The FTP client is an idiot, but the IP stack on the client's home/business router is not and says "oh, that's an address living in RFC1918 space, I shouldn't send that out over the internet" and they don't get the results of their LIST.
So, how do you fix this? Well, you fix it by not using FTP. Use SFTP USE SFTP USE SFTP FOR GOD'S SAKE. But since this world is a shit fucking place, you have two options. The best option is to configure your FTP server to lie about its IP address. Rather than being honest about what a fool it is, you can tell it to send your public IP address to the client rather than the network adapter IP address. Does your public IP address change? Fuck you, you get to write a daemon that checks for that shit, rewrites your FTP server config, and HUPs the bastard (or SIGTERMs it if your server sucks and can't do a live config reload).
Let's say that you don't want to do that. Let's say you work at a small company with a small business internet plan that gives you static IPs but a shitty modem. Let's say that you don't know what FTP is or how it works and your boss told you to get it set up ASAP and it's not working (because the client over in Bendoverville Arkansas is being told to connect to a 10.x.x.x address) and it surely must be your ISP's fault. So you call up Comcast Business/AT&T/Verizon/Whoeverthefuck and you complain at their technicians for hours and hours, and eventually you get connected to a human that knows what the problem is and tells you how to configure your stupid FTP server to lie like a little sinner. The big telco megacorps don't like that. They don't want to waste all those hours, and they don't want to hire too many people who can figure that shit out because it's expensive. You wanna know what those fucking asshole companies did?
Continued in part 3.
honestly: activity pub, matrix, xmpp, markdown and soo many more probably. All of these would be able to solve our walled gardens problem, but the apps with a basically monopoly don't have much of an incentivw to implement them
XMPP.
Now that we have Matrix? I would have agreed with you in 2010.
Now when we have Matrix, we also need to deal with rescuing people from a NIH protocol designed around a property nobody needs.
matrix, or at least interop standards for online communications. It's such bullshit that you make a shitty chat app, and just because it's free and relatively featured, become the single existing monopoly of chat applications.
Like idgaf as long as i can host a bridge between discord and matrix or some shit, and you technically can, but it's a right pain in the ass to do so.
definitely some alternative internet mesh routing standart, just imagine if every device with wifi or ethernet could just extend the network without relying on an isp, yeah they could still serve as a fast backbone, but they just wouldn't be needed and no disaster could really ever disrupt the whole internet again
PGP/GPG. I would like to see the web of trust take off. Also I love the aesthetic for anything that's been signed, and would like to see blog posts everywhere be nested by long blocks of random symbols.
PGP has a bunch of limits (and I'm saying that as a cryptography nerd). We've learned a lot of things since the 90's and the better solutions are specialized encryption protocols like MLS / Matrix (E2EE group messaging) and running all kinds of other protocols on top.
The portable identity part of PGP can be handled by something like DID documents which works more like Keybase used to do (depending on specific implementation) where your declare a list of supported protocols with public keys and accounts under your control, so people can still achieve the same effect of using a strong cryptographic identifier to communicate with you, but with forward secrecy supported by default and much lower risk of stuff like sidechannel attacks.
Yeah but the aesthetic!
RCS compatibility between iOS and Android operating systems
I want us to stop using communication protocols that are tied to our connectivity providers. Let alone tied to a specific piece of hardware (SIM card).
"Telephone providers" should be just another ISP. And whatever I do over the network shouldn't care if it is running on a mobile network or a landline fibre.
While we are at it let's fuck off with this SIM shit. You don't get to run code on my device. Give me an authentication key that I can use to connect to your network and then just transfer my packets. My device runs my code.
Google has used RCS as their latest attempt at entering the messenger market. I really don't see why anybody else would want to adopt it under these circumstances. I mean Samsung did but Samsung is playing their own little paranoid game with Google, they don't really give a crap about RCS.
Basically Google killed RCS. They will never be able to make anybody adopt it against their will in the EU, people will stick to what messenger services they're already using. If they ever attempt to turn it on by default in their own app it will turn into a regulatory issue so fast their head will spin.
Hashcash
RSS. It's still around but slowly dying out. I feel like it only gets added to new websites because the programmers like it.
90% of the bullshit mass emails at my work could be an RSS feed.
"THIS WHOLE MEETING COULD HAVE BEEN AN RSS FEED!"
WebSub (formerly PubSubHubbub). Should have been a proper replacement for RSS with push support instead of polling. Too bad the docs were awful and adopting it as an end user was so difficult that it never caught on.
It's seen its renneisance recently