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.
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
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.
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.
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).
I agree 💯
IPv6
I mean, why the hell is IPv4 still a thing??
Because ipv6 is yucky
Yeah I’m anti IPv6 so I’m not going to ever use it personally. Ipv4 is enough for me
Removed by mod
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.
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.
odf/odt/ods
.md
SimpleX
Matrix
OpenPGP
Last, certainly not least… ActivityPub
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.
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.
XMPP
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.
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 second Matrix, though I’ve been waiting for e2ee direct p2p (the Dendrite project) do be worked on for a while. Having something like that, that’s truly decentralized while secure and hiding metadata where possible, would be a dream.
Apparently dendrite is just on maintenance due to insufficient funds. It was what i set up on a test instance because it is lighter, etc. Go figure.
I love i2p. I wish it had more adoption / was easier to use.
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.
Remember SOAP? Remember XML-RPC? Remember CORBA?
Those were not very good.
I’ve worked with all of them and hate all with a passion. SOAP wasn’t bad in theory but lots of APIs and clients didn’t implement it properly.
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
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.
The delay is there because email has no deletion support.
And a host of other shortcomings.
I’d rather we replaced email with matrix
If you’re relying on the remote server to delete something, you can’t trust it no matter what protocol you’re using.
For a regular email, the chance to undo might be fine, but for real time communication, it’s just an unnecessary road block.
Maybe if it was optional per recipient, or per conversation, or better yet, depending on the presence of a header, it might be fine. Gmail only supports all-on or all-off.
If you’re relying on the remote server to delete something, you can’t trust it no matter what protocol you’re using.
I mean yeah I wouldn’t bet my life on it, but for the 99% of regular communication it’s fine. That’s no reason to not have it in the protocol and muck around with 10 second delays instead.
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 [email protected], 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.
SMTP is a terrible protocol. Text based for sending effectively binary data with complex header wrapping and “generate a random delimiter” framing. We really need a HTTP/2 of SMTP.
That being said I agree that it exists and works. The biggest blocker to more IM-style communication is largely the UI and user expectations. I have no problem having quick back-and-forths over email but most people don’t expect it.
Fair enough. Sending binary data over SMTP adds a lot of overhead, because it all has to be encoded. We should fix that.
Honestly my biggest complaint is header wrapping. Technically you need to wrap lines at 998 bytes (not that any reasonable server actually cares). But in order to wrap a header you need to add spaces (because you can only break a line after whitespace). But where spaces are unimportant depends on each specific header. So you need to have custom wrapping rules for each header.
In practice no one does this. They just hope that headers naturally have spaces or break them in random locations (corrupting them) because the protocol was too stupid.
Binary protocols are just so much simpler. Give the length, then the data. Problem solved. Maybe we could even use a standard format for structured headers. But that would be harder to do while maintaining backwards compatibility.
OpenTelemetry everywhere please
Can you please explain what this is?
They are humorous IETF standards published on 1 April over the years. These are specifically about implementing internet protocols using carrier pigeons instead of more traditional media like wires or optical fiber.
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.
key signing and web of trust is pretty cool but i’m somewhat opposed to it on a fundamental level. Let me decentralize my shit and mind my own business if you feel what i mean.
Anything that’s relatively centralized identity wise is not something i’m a huge fan of right off the hop.
Let me decentralize my shit…
Isn’t that why it’s a web of trust, and not a center of trust? I think you might be confusing that with public key infrastructure.
Also, you can’t decentralize your shit without a second party. That’s kind of the point.
Isn’t that why it’s a web of trust, and not a center of trust?
yes, but it’s still a trust, i don’t consider that to be fully decentralized. It serves a purpose don’t get me wrong, but i won’t be signing my online profiles using WoT keys anytime soon.
The web makes it decentralized, which is accurate, though i tend to use decentralize way more aggressively on a level local to me. I suppose it’s probably more dis-integrated, than anything. But whatever.
