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!
RSS. It’s still around but slowly dying out. I feel like it only gets added to new websites because the programmers like it.
It’s seen its 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
I wish more websites would use RSS Feeds. :-(
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.
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.
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.
Have you read the CommonMark specification? It’s very complex for a language that’s 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.
I think Obsidian and Logseq are helping to change this.
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.
Hedgedoc / hackmd support a good amount of extensions out of the box. I think typora and obsidias do also (but not open source).
It is too basic. I guess something more full-fledged like… typst?
Typst is a typesetting format - an alternative to LaTeX. Asciidoc is more of a competitor to markdown.
Learning that currently.
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
I agree 💯
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 ipv6 addresses. For two days, we could all see which sites implemented ipv6 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!
IPv6 is great, but NAT is quite functional and is prolonging the demise of IPv4.
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.
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.
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%.
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.
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?
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 :)
Honestly there is rarely a blog I want to follow that doesn’t have it. I do think it would be great to have more readers using it so that it becomes more significant, but for my reading it is actually pretty great.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
XMPP
Call me old fashioned, but I still call it Jabber.
🙂
It really is a better name.
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.
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.
There’s only one case I’ve found where Wi-Fi use seems acceptable in IoT: ESPHome. It’s open-source firmware for microcontrollers that makes DIY IoT sensors and controls accessible over LAN without phoning home to whatever remote server, without trying to make anything accessible over the Internet, and without breaking in any way if the device has no route to the Internet.
I still wouldn’t call Wi-Fi use ideal even there; mesh can help in larger homes and Z-Wave/Zigbee radios tend to be more power efficient, though ESP32 isn’t exactly suited for a battery-powered device that’s expected to run 24/7 regardless.
Isn’t Matter supposed to solve this issue?
Yes but at least Hue (and IKEA and LIDL and many other brands’) lights work well with open Zigbee coordinators, like deconz and ZHA in Home Assistant.
I wish there were more Zigbee and Zwave and less WiFi IoT devices too. I don’t even have a Zwave coordinator because I never found anything I wanted with Zwave support.
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.
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 suppose that’s the case, but if you ever partially open source something, i think you’re probably trying a little too hard.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- Communication: Matrix
- Browsing: I2P
- Communities: ActivityPub / Mastodon
- Software Forge: Fogejo + ForgeFed
- OS: Linux
- Money: Monero
Since they meet at least one of,
if not all of the following:- Decentralized / Federated
- Sensorship resistant
- Privacy respecting
- Open source
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.
True, Lemmy (and activitypub in general) could integrate RSS and also be accessible via NNTP.
Or at least add some functionality for offline reading/posting. It’s just not a priority for devs now.
About spam, most of spam was coming from Google groups and since Google unpeered from Usenet, there is no spam.
Content addressable protocols are better for asynchronous use. I’d like to see a proper bluesky atprotocol fork with “post lexicons” properly adapted for forums, they’re built on top of content addressing and public key based account IDs along with 3rd party moderation tooling support integrated and custom 3rd party feeds/views.
XMPP.
Now that we have Matrix? I would have agreed with you in 2010.
Matrix is daaaaamn slow. And not private.
Now when we have Matrix, we also need to deal with rescuing people from a NIH protocol designed around a property nobody needs.
peer 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.