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!
XMPP.
Came here to say this. Chart could have been as general as email.
Now that we have Matrix? I would have agreed with you in 2010.
Matrix is daaaaamn slow. And not private.
Matrix tries to kill XMPP but the reality is that if you want to self-host, XMPP is much less of a hassle. Also, Matrix is an open standard as in “pay big money to participate in the openness”. https://matrix.org/blog/2022/12/01/funding-matrix-via-the-matrix-org-foundation/
Membership comes at various levels, each with different rewards:
Individual memberships (i.e. today’s Patreon supporters): Ability to vote in the appointment of up to 2 ‘community representatives’ to the Foundation's governing board. Name on the Matrix.org website Silver member: between £2,000 and £80,000 per year, depending on organisation size Ability to vote on the appointment of up to 2 ‘Silver representative’ to the Foundation's governing board Supporter logo on the front page of the new Matrix.org website Gold member: £200,000 / year, adds: Ability to vote on the appointment of up to 3 ‘Gold representatives’ to the Foundation's governing board. Press release announcing the sponsorship 1 original post on the Matrix.org blog per year Participation in the internal Spec Core Team room Larger logo on the front page of Matrix.org Platinum member: £500,000 / year, adds: Ability to vote on the appointment of up to 5 ‘platinum representatives’ to the Foundation's governing board. 1 sponsored Matrix Live episode per year Largest logo on the front page of Matrix.organd nearly every client has something that’s half baked, and it’s funded by a shady UK nonprofit with links to israeli intelligence, and…
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.
markdown is standardized? I haven’t found two parsers that parse the same file the same for any but the most trivial documents
That’s what I mean by a lack of a standard for markdown. There needs to be at least a core standards for stuff (like bolding and italics), that is universal across stuff. Then if a program wants to add onto it, that’s fine. But just the core parts being standardized would help a lot.
There are some pseudo-standards for it. Github-flavoured markdown is probably the biggest of them. Then you get things like Obsidian-flavoured markdown that is based off of Github’s.
Heads up for anyone (like me) who isn’t already familiar with SimpleX, unfortunately its name makes it impossible to search for unless you already know what it is. I was only able to track it down after a couple frustrating minutes after I added “linux” into the search on a lark.
I am so confused on how simpleX works
going based on preliminary understanding of this shit, it looks like it does all of the user handling on the client side explicitly, server side probably doesn’t do anything of the significant sort.
Or at least to a degree that provides reasonable assurance that X person is different from Y person based on the messaging alone. Though your typing style is going to significantly influence it regardless of that.
probably not accurate, just what i gleaned in about 3 minutes.
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…
90% of the bullshit mass emails at my work could be an RSS feed.
“THIS WHOLE MEETING COULD HAVE BEEN AN RSS FEED!”
I wish more websites would use RSS Feeds. :-(
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)
It’s part of the RSS 2.0 standard. Of course it requires adoption by feed publishers.
Oh neat! I didn’t know this existed. By any chance, do you know of any RSS readers that have implemented it?
No I’m sorry, I pull my feeds manually using a barebones reader. I’m guessing your best bet is one of the web-based readers as it would require a client with a TCP port that’s reachable from the web. I have never seen a feed who provided the rssCloud feature though.
It’s seen it’s renneisance recently
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?
Sadly so many rss feeds are just the first paragraph and not the whole article
There are a bunch of message broker services out there, and having a consistent set of common keys along with a documented process for transforming events to/from different systems means that this kind of data can move through different systems without getting mangled. It does have a spec for JSON, so it can be considered just a standardized JSON blob with transformation rules. But it also has a protobuf spec, specs for MQTT, NATS, HTTP, Avro, etc. It’s a common language for all these systems.
I used to have an open public SIP address that would ring a home phone, complete with a retro answering machine, but nobody uses SIP…
[…] nobody uses SIP…
Say what?
In my part of the world signaling for literally every phone call, be it mobile or fixed, traverses networks and operators using SIP.
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.
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
That’s a fun little game there!
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%.
50%?? I fucking wish. In Spain we are at 5%. I finally got IPv6 in my phone this year, but I want it in my home, which is still only available as IPv4 even if they’re the same ISP.
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.
Am sysadmin, can confirm I don’t wanna learn it.
Also a sysasmin, really don’t wanna learn it…or have to type it on the daily
IPv6 is great, but NAT is quite functional and is prolonging the demise of IPv4.
NAT is also good security wise. Personally I’d rather the inside of my network stay completely anonymous
Found the guy that does not want to learn IPv6!
You’re thinking of a firewall. NAT is just the thing that makes a connection appear to come from an IP on the internet when it’s really coming from your router, and it’s not needed with IPv6. But you would not see any difference with IPv6 without it.
You’re thinking of a firewall. NAT is just the thing that makes a connection appear to come from…
That connection only “appears to come from” if I explicitly put a rule in my NAT table directing it to my computer behind the router doing the NAT-ing.
Otherwise all connections through NAT are started from internal->external network requests and the state table in NAT keeps track of which internal IP is talking to which external IP and directs traffic as necessary.
So OP is correct, it does apply a measure of security. Port scanning someone behind NAT isn’t possible, you just end up port scanning their crappy NAT router provided by their ISP unless they have specifically opened up some ports and directed them to their internal IP address.
Compare this to IPV6 where you get a slice of the public address space to place your devices in and they are all directly addressable. In that case your crappy ISP router also is a “proper” firewall. Strangely enough it usually is a “stateful” firewall with default deny-all rules that tracks network connections and looks and performs almost exactly like the NAT version, just without address translation.
So OP is correct, it does apply a measure of security. Port scanning someone behind NAT isn’t possible, you just end up port scanning their crappy NAT router provided by their ISP unless they have specifically opened up some ports and directed them to their internal IP address.
You end up just port scanning their crappy router on IPv6 as well because ports that are not opened are stuck at the firewall either way, no matter if you use IPv4 or IPv6.
Just because every device gets a public IP does not mean that IP is publicly accessible.
An advantage that IPv6 has against port scanning is the absurdly large network sizes. For example, my ISP gives me a /56 prefix, that is 4,722,366,482,869,645,213,696 IPv6 addresses. Good luck finding the used ones with the port open you need.
Even with just a /64 prefix you get 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 addresses, way outside the feasibility of port scanning.
You can have that with ipv6, too.
NAT is not for security, that’s what the firewall is for. Nobody can access your IPv6 network unless you allow access through the firewall.
I don’t think they were talking about access to the network.
“The inside of the network stay anonymous” sounds like they are talking about internet access to the internal network.
If computers connect to others through the internet, the IPv6 address can reveal how many computers there are on the local network, and if certain traffic to different destinations are coming from the same computer, but also if one of the computers has gone offline but then resumes from sleep/hibernation.
To me their comment means they want to avoid that, and I agree, I want to avoid that too. To fix these, I would need to configure NAT on my router for IPv6.Yes IPv6 address privacy extensions help somewhat, but
- computers won’t use a different v6 address for every distinct destination, they will just start using a new one from time to time
- computers won’t stop using the old v6 address immediately after wakeup
With v4 addresses these did not really matter, because everything was being sent from the same public IP, and and outside observer could only see what a “network” is doing collectively. But with v6 an address identifies a computer, across websites/services. Even if it’s just for a "short’ time, even if the address is randomized.
If you want privacy, you need some kind of VPN or onion routing. Even if everything you list were correct, the difference between IPv4 and 6 for privacy would be marginal.
No. Stop spreading that myth. NAT does fuck all for security. If you want a border gateway, you can just have a border gateway.
NAT is functional as long as you like NAT, which im pretty sure nobody likes, so uh.
Plenty of people like NAT.
the only people that like nat are network admins, and ISPs.
Everyone else hates them. The rest don’t care, but they wouldn’t know a NAT if it hit them in the face.
My isp decided to put me behind a CGNAT and broke my access to my network from outside my network. Wanted to charge me $5 a month to get around it. It’s not easy to get around for a layman, but possible. More than anything it just pissed me off that I’d have to pay for something that 1 day ago was free.
How can you bypass CGNAT?
Set up a reverse proxy on another machine (like one of those free oracle cloud things). I can’t go into detail because I don’t know exactly how. I think cloudflare also has options for that for free. Either way it’s annoying.
Cloudflare tunnel, and its alternatives, such as localXpose, altho the privacy is probably questionable, and a many of them require a domain.
OpenTelemetry everywhere please
finger cyclohexane@lemmy.mlI 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
Also KDX. I was too young to use that, but tried and it’s cool. Sadly even FOSS clients are all dead and don’t build anymore. (I think I had limited success with patching one called Fidelio to build, but that was a few years ago and I can’t find any traces of that attempt.)
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.
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.
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!
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.
i2p. It’s sorta like Tor, but the way that every user is a node provides some advantages over Tor.
A few years ago there was a Lemmy instance on I2P
was? so it’s not anymore?
Yea I think it shut down due to lack of users/interest. This was before Lemmy even had federation working, so much smaller community
so would you be able to run ipfs under i2p to have a secure and private ipfs?
Technically yes by rewriting ipfs’s code, but due to ipfs’s flaws you would be better off using something like freenet/hyphanet which has been designed for that purpose and has been successfully running since 2000, with the added benefit that the data is actually stored in the network by others instead of just by you (at least when you often request the data)
Also the user interface and builtin solutions for torrenting, hosting, address booking make it way more user friendly for people to start using I find.
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.
At this point Microsoft could use the .odf standard and people won’t notice that and they will be using MSOffice anyways.
Only a fraction of us would use LO or OO or anything 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.
- 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
I personally feel like it should be a standard extended markdown that allows latex code.
I honestly just use it for my resume with a template I found, so my knowledge is extremely basic, but I really do love the concept that I can “compile” and actually see the source of my document’s formatting.
It really needs to significantly improve its live update capability. Typst is more capable in that regard.
For me it’s more pleasant than editing formulae in LO, but still took a lot of time.
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.
Outside of academia, would you say it still provides significant upside over markdown?
Markdown and LaTeX are meant for entirely different purposes. It’s somewhat analogous to HTML vs PDF. While it’s possible to write books with Markdown, it’s a vastly inferior solution compared to latex or typst (for fixed format docs like books).
It’s got a vim-sized learning curve to really leverage it
As a regular vim user, I have to say. Vim makes sense after you put some effort into learning it. I can’t say the same about latex.
It’s not a standard but still its an interesting software so I’ll post this here:
Joking aside, I love and hate it. Its paradigm is almost like using the C preprocessor to build a really awkward Turing-machine. TeX/LaTeX does a great job of what it was intended to do; it applies high quality typesetting rules to complex material and produces really good results. I love the output I can get with it and I will be eternally grateful that Donald Knuth decided to tackle this problem. And despite my complaints below, that gratitude is genuine. Being able to redefine something in a context-sensitive way, or to be able to rely on semantics to produce spacing appropriate to an operator vs a variable etc; these are beautiful things.
The problem is, at least once a day I’m left wishing I could just write a callable routine in a normal language with variables, types, arrays, loops and so on. You can implement all those things in TeX, but TeX doesn’t have a normal notion of strings, numbers or arrays, so it is rare that you can do a complicated thing in an efficient way, with readable code. So as a language, TeX frequently leads to cargo-cult programming. I’m not aware that you can invoke reflection after a page is output, to see what decisions on glue and breaks were made; but at the same time you can’t conditionally include something that is dependent on those decisions, since the decision will depend on what is included. This leads to some horrible conditionals combined with compiling twice, and the results are not always deterministic. Sometimes I find it’s quicker to work around things like that by writing an external program that modifies the resulting PDF output, but that seems perverse.
At the same time, there’s really nothing else out there that comes close to doing what LaTeX does, and if you have the patience, the quality of documents it can produce is essentially unbounded. The legacy of encodings, category codes, parameter limits, stack limits etc. just makes it very hard for package writers, and consumes a great deal of time for a lot of people. But maybe I am picky about things that a saner person would just live with.
A lot of very talented people have written a lot of very complex packages to save the user from these esoteric details, and as a result LaTeX is alive and well, and 99% of the time you can get the results you want, using off-the-shelf parts. The remaining 1% of the time, getting the result you want requires a level of expertise that is unreasonable to expect of users. (For comparison, I wrote an optimising C compiler and generally found it far easier to make that work as expected, than some of the things I’ve tried, and failed, to do properly in LaTeX. I now have a rule; if getting some weird alignment to work takes me more than an hour, I just fake it with a postscript file, an image, or write an external program to generate it longhand, in order to save my sanity.)
I think (and certainly hope) that LaTeX is here to stay, in much the same way that C and assembly language are. As time moves forward I think we’ll see more and more abstractions and fewer people dealing with the internals. But I will be forever grateful to the people who are experts in TeX, and who keep providing us with incredible packages.
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.
They host a proprietary service that does all the stuff, the compiler and spec are completely FOSS. So you need to create your own implementations, which is not hard.
I dont think they will close source the compiler. And thats basically everything thats needed?
I have 0 problems with people creating a fancy proprietary implementation to get people hooked. I will never use an online editor, but why care?
Learning LaTeX and working around its quirks seems like a much better time investment than sidegrading to something that lives on premises given by a proprietary commercial project. If someone saw LaTeX and said “I want to make some version of this that is better”, without alterior motives, they would probably just work on improving LaTeX (which a whole lot of people do).
Fancy does not mean better, and often is in many ways worse than plain old boring.
You know Overleaf is a thing right?
Many projects need to be rewritten from scratch I think. But I also think an easier markup language for LaTeX could be possible, keeping all the nice templates etc.
From the LaTeX project:
The experience gained from the production and maintenance of LaTeX2e (the version you have been using for many years) had a major influence on our goals for future development and on new code which is now integrated into LaTeX.
A while ago we made the decision to drop the idea of a separate LaTeX3 format that would exist in parallel to LaTeX2e, but instead decided to gradually modernize LaTeX to keep it competitive in today’s world while maintaining compatibility methods for older documents.
I think this decision was pretty much a good one.
Overleaf does not modernize LaTeX in meaningful ways. It only adds cloud functionality and glossy appearance that you can get on dedicated editors anyways.
No, but Overleaf is just a proprietary fancy editor like the Typst one. Meanwhile typst is just as usable for building editor too.
I dont see any arguments against typst really. I am using Markdown all time and find it best, but lacking. Then LaTeX, honestly I dont want to learn as it must be a pain to write.
Now in typst, you can write academic papers etc just as well. All you need is free software, with good backing, modern tooling (rust, cargo), thus it runs everywhere. Its pretty cool!
or you could also just make an open source wrapper for latex and call it a day.
Nothing needs to be closed source to get people to use it.
And it isnt :D the compiler produces PDFs which can be read with anything. The spec is open so you can write the code with any editor.
Just needs integration, will see if I can add the syntax highlighting to Kate
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.
It’s basically ubiquitous in academia
You mean STEM. In the humanities we do just fine without, tyvm.
IDK dude. My sister is doing master’s in Philosophy. She uses LaTeX, and so do most others in her batch.
ok well to be fair philosophers will also fuck shit up just to make a point. So i’m not sure how fair that is.
