Whether you’re really passionate about RPC, MQTT, Matrix or Nostr, tell us more about the protocols or open standards you have strong opinions on!
- IPv6, needed for modern Internet not to collapse, would make many other important things easier. Easier to become an ISP, to selfhost, to build P2P networks, etc.
- GNU Taler, a payment protocol just look at it go: https://101010.pl/@didek/111934952208145427, or just imagine building a payment terminal of a Raspberry Pi
- Matrix, to unify chat, conference and calling apps
- some self-arranging darknet protocol becoming a norm like I2P, GNUNet or Yggdrasil, so we could have a backup when mass Internet blockage happen
I really hope matrix gets native VoIP. I saw like 2 years ago it was in beta, haven’t kept up with it though. I’d also really like voice channels like discord so my friends and I can replace discord but it seems like matrix isn’t interested in being a discord replacement
Matrix can be configured to have VoIP. I have it set up on my server. Haven’t tried it in group voice chat setting yet though. Only 1 on 1
Matrix I have doubts about. The idea of Tox was nicer, but the implementation quality and the scandal at some point didn’t help.
Tox felt more playable, like piping files over it or a remote shell over it (I know, bad associations, but still), or even using it for VPN. I think there were clients allowing to do such stuff, and the protocol allows it.
EDIT: I mean, it’s still alive, just don’t see it claiming the place of FOSS old Skype replacement as it did.
GNUNet - all you people mentioning it have peers? I tried to set it up a few weeks ago, couldn’t get peers.
Yggdrasil - feels cool.
I2P - not intended for that, I think.
About Tox, I am not a fan of mixing up universal delivering of packets and applications. Piping files or using as VPS feels like something that would be better done with proper full network and not be mixed with chat.
I, on the contrary, think it’s cool for things to be universal, layered and reusable for different tasks.
What scandal did Matrix have? I only just tried out Matrix like a month ago and am unaware of anything like that.
Tox, not Matrix.
I2P - not intended for that, I think.
to be clear, I2P is not really intended for anything, it’s used for everything. It supports all kinds of things, and there are people doing all kinds of things on it. Though i could see potential technological limitations being a problem.
I’m stupid, can you elaborate a little further about how ipv6 would make becoming an ISP easier?
There are no IPv4 addresses left. So you eather go IPv6-only, which would make many services not work. Or wait in a long queue to repurpose address spaces marked as depracated which would soon run out too. And then you put clients behind double or triple NAT doing having shitty service.
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
IPv6
I mean, why the hell is IPv4 still a thing??
Because SecOps still thinks NAT is security, and NetOps is decidedly against carrying around that stupid tradition.
You can even Nat still if you want too lol
That said have you looked at securing ipv6 networks?It can be a lot of new paridgms that need to be secured.
Because ipv6 is yucky
Yeah I’m anti IPv6 so I’m not going to ever use it personally. Ipv4 is enough for me
go ahead and use that on your home network, but if you work in IT and deploy it on public networks i’m going to kick you in the nuts
It may be enough for you, but not for everybody.
Try to remember a handful of them
damn if only we had a service that like, obfuscated and abstracted these hard to remember IPs that aren’t very user friendly, and turned them into something more usable. That would be cool i think. Someone should make that.
Some kind of name system surely.
perhaps one that were to operate on like, a domain level, maybe.
gah, i’m just not too sure there’s a good term for this though.
For what?
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On the Internet, no. On my home LAN? Absolutely. I disabled all IPv6 at home.
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.
Which ISPs offer IPv6 for free?
Asking for a friend.Should be every single one that supports IPv6.
For that matter, you should be getting an entire /60 at a minimum. Probably more like /56.
IPv6 addresses are practically endless, therefore their value is practically 0. ISPs justify charging extra for static IPv4 because IPv4 addresses do have a value.
If ISPs charge for static IPv6, then one of them could just give that service for free (while keeping the rest of the prices the same as their competitors). That would get them more customers while costing them nothing.
EDIT: I can’t give you an example of an ISP that offers free static IPv6 because there are no ISPs in my country that offer IPv6.
I don’t even remember my old ICQ UIN. People usually do that.
So yes, bring in IPv6.
Shortening rules actually make IPv6 addresses easier to remember than IPv4. Just don’t use auto configuration.
::1
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I hear you on this! Took me a whole day to get my router to delegate IPv6 properly. I’m sure that had it been better adopted, I wouldn’t be having such a hard time.
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.
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 frigging love markdown for everything!
My main wishlist for markdown, is a better live collaborative markdown editor. Hedgedoc works, but it’s showing it’s age, and they don’t seem to be getting close to releasing v2.
Etherpad also has a markdown extension, but it doesn’t import / export that well.
Markdown is awesome, I agree! I did not realize you could extend markdown with anything other than html. The html extension is quite nice to do anything that markdown doesn’t support natively, but I wish there was an easier way to extend markdown. Maybe the ones you listed are what I need.
It is too basic. I guess something more full-fledged like… typst?
ReST (restructured text) is a good middle ground. I just wish it had more support outside of the python community. It could use some new/better tooling than Sphinx
Typst is a typesetting format - an alternative to LaTeX. Asciidoc is more of a competitor to markdown.
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.
Silly question why can’t you convert markdown to PDF and pass that to publishers?
Because it isn’t doc is docx.
Publishers are pissy about such things. Even self publishing (which is what I do now), the various outlets still have limits to what they will use. Amazon accepts something like three file formats, including their own, and pdf isn’t on the list.
I could just do pdf for directly giving them away to people, but even then, epub is usually a better pick in terms of readability since that’s the standard for actual books since ereaders tend to display it better than pdfs. Most people reading books via files would be using something that can give a better experience with epub vs pdf.
Just set up pandoc and Bob’s your uncle. It’ll convert markdown to anything. You’ll never have to open another word processor.
Nice! Thanks for the tip!
Edit: holy shit, how have I never run across that before? That’s a brilliant program right there.
Pandoc + [your markdown editor of choice] is magic. Some editors even come with Pandoc as a dependency so you can export to more or less anything from the GUI. I think GhostWriter and Zettlr at least (I honestly can’t be sure, I’ve changed editors so often and now I just have some Pandoc conversion scripts in my file manager menu).
For sure, I bet full fledged editors like word don’t even let you import it.
Not correctly, no. Librewriter does a bit better, but still misses some bits
I think Obsidian and Logseq are helping to change this.
Markdown is terrible as a standard because every parser works differently and when you try to standardize it (CommonMark, etc.), you find out that there are a bajillion edge cases, leading to an extremely bloated specification.
Agreed in principle, but in practice, I find it’s rarely a problem.
While editing, we pick an export tool for all editors and stick to it.
Once the document is stable, we export it to HTML or PDF and it’ll be stable forever.
Most ppl have settled on Commonmark luckily, including us.
Have you read the CommonMark specification? It’s very complex for a language tha’t supposed to be lightweight.
What’s the alternative? We either have everything specified well, or we’ll have a million slightly incompatible implementations. I’ll take the big specification. At least it’s not HTML5.
An alternative would be a language with a simpler syntax. Something like XML, but less verbose.
And then we’ll be back to a hundred slightly incompatible versions. You need detailed specifications to avoid that. Why not stick to markdown?
Not if the language is standardized from the start.
Commonmark leaves some stuff like tables unspecified. That creates the need for another layer like GFM or mistletoe. Standardization is not a strong point for markdown.
I believe commonmark tries to specify a minimum baseline spec, and doesn’t try to to expand beyond that. It can be frustrating bc we’d like to see tables, superscripts, spoilers, and other things standardized, but I can see why they’d want to keep things minimal.
Asciidoc is a good example of why everything should be standardized. While markdown has multiple implementations, any document is tied to just one implementation. Asciidoc has just one implementation. But when the standard is ready, you should be able to switch implementations seamlessly.
I agree 💯
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.
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.
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.
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RSS. It’s still around but slowly dying out. I feel like it only gets added to new websites because the programmers like it.
Theres quite a few sites that still use it and existing ones in the Fediverse have it built in (which is really cool). But your right, the general public have no concept of having something download and queue up on a service rather than just going to the site. And the RSS clients are all over the place with quality…
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.
I still want something push based (without paying for those rss as a service)
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Oh neat! I didn’t know this existed. By any chance, do you know of any RSS readers that have implemented it?
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I wish more websites would use RSS Feeds. :-(
90% of the bullshit mass emails at my work could be an RSS feed.
“THIS WHOLE MEETING COULD HAVE BEEN AN RSS FEED!”
It’s seen it’s renneisance recently
Sadly so many rss feeds are just the first paragraph and not the whole article
How so? Outside very niche stuff or podcasts I just don’t seem to it used that often.
Most websites still use standard back ends with RSS support. Even static site generators also do it. The only difficulty is user discovery.
Yeah… It always being there hardly makes it a “renaissance”, no?
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
I wish my employer just accepted my push to use OAuth…
XMPP
Why is that preferable over Matrix?
It’s kinda more resposive than Matrix for me.
Yeah, my experience with Element and a Matrix.org account is that it’s sluggish. However, it’s been better at Beeper, so I’m uncertain whether it’s intrinsic to Matrix or merely Matrix.org and/or Element’s servers.
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?
I don’t believe that its existence causes more fragmentation than it remediates. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36939482 explains why I consider Matrix fundamentally superior most (if not all) uses, although in practice it’s because the clients (Element and FluffyChat primarily) are cross-platform and support a generally uniform set of features, in comparison to the aged (but glorious) Pidgin, and its counterparts.
Your hackernews post and the fact you mention Pidgin shows that you haven’t used xmpp in the last 10 years. By the time Matrix was first released, xmpp had history sync.
Which is why I can’t wrap my head around why a second protocol with no features that didn’t already exist in XMPP took over.
I used it yesterday, via Pidgin. I’m
rokejulianlockhart@xmpp.jp. Why else would I have referenced it? Don’t tell me what I’ve done. That’s not a way to have productive conversations.Regardless, I can’t provide any more technical insight than that - I know solely that the clients provide so much more functionality that irrespective of the protocol, it’s better in practice. Fedora, openSUSE, the Bundeswehr, NATO, and Beeper - all chose Matrix over XMPP, not least partially because of Element (which they also all chose).
Do Not Track
Such a simple solution for the cookie banner issue. But it prevented websites from tricking users into allowing them to gather their data, so it had to go.
Nobody was going to honor that. That’s just giving them an extra bit of data to track you with.
It could be forced by law
Globally?
Those cookie banners that were introduced because of an EU law and are seen all over the world
Most of those cookie banners are not even needed, you only need them for tracking cookie, not login and session cookies. But of course everyone decided it is just easier to nag all the users with a big splash screen.
A lot of them are not even doing it right, you are not allowed to hint the user that accept all is the “correct” choice by having it in a different color than the others. And being able to say no to all shouls be as easy as accepting all, often it isn’t.
Basically, cookie banners are usually not needed and when they are they are most often incorrectlt designed (not by accident).
But of course everyone decided it is just easier to nag all the users with a big splash screen.
Nope, the thing is, you’ll very rarely find a website that only uses technically necessary session/login cookies. The reason every fucking website, yes, even the one from the barber shop around the corner, has a humongous cookie banner is that every fucking website helps google and other corporations to track users across the whole internet for no reason.
Yes, seen by people visiting EU websites or companies with an EU presence. And because whether or not they assign a cookie is easily verifiable by the person on the other end.
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 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.
Which Wikipedia page?
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.
Probably it would be better to edit my comment, but I’ll go with a reply to myself.
To all fans of RSS: there’s this service called FeedBase that is essentially a RSS to NNTP gate. You add your RSS feed to that and it becomes a newsgroup on their server, and you can subscribe to it using any NNTP client. New articles appear as new posts in that newsgroup and you can post your own replies to them. So, you get RSS but with discussions or comments.
If you try this, let me know what RSS feeds you’re reading, so we could read the articles together and have some discussion there!
P.S. This comment is not an ad. I genuinely love feedbase and use that myself.
Holy cow, that’s neat as hell! Thanks for sharing!
Back in the day I was a big Usenet fan. What’s the modern solution to the spam issue? At the time, folk wisdom was that the demise was being caused by spam, and that due to the nature of the protocol it was somehwhat unsolveable.
I also wonder to what extent activity pub is the barrier to offline use? For reddit, the Slide client had offline reading and iirc posting. I have been disappointed it isn’t available for Lemmy. My guess has been it simply isn’t a priority for the devs. Maybe eventually we will get it.
I think it would be cool if RSS got put into Lemmy clients. Example you could make a unified inbox for all accounts by automatically getting the private RSS for incoming messages for all logged in accounts. I have manually set this up a couple of times but its tedious. Completely lacks smoothness when it comes to clicking a link, replying etc. But a client could add a little finesse to fix that.
pee to peer, i would be happier thitking that every time i open somo application, i’m helping it, like i2p
Ever heard of IPFS? I really hope that will take off some time.
Unfortunately the reality of IPFS is that despite its huge funding it was poorly designed from the start and still to this day has much slower loading times then my I2pd instance (despite i2p transmiting messages through multiple encrypted proxies), to the point where the company working on the rust implementation determined it was so bad they had to scrap the whole thing to make something that actually worked. Not to mention that I managed to have my server taken over by some kind of malware by downloading a particular piece of content.
Thanks, that was an interesting read! I always felt IPFS wasn’t ready yet, but the value it tries to provide of being a file system, I’ve found no real alternative to. Very good to read that iroh is willing to look beyond the IPFS spec to provide its values with better performance. I hope it works out.
🤨
Many years ago I found Silc very interesting.
I’ve been playing with MQTT on meshtastic. I really hope LoRa and meshtastic continue to grow.
The more they grow, the busier the spectrum will be. I really hope it doesn’t grow too much.
