There are a couple I have in mind. Like many techies, I am a huge fan of RSS for content distribution and XMPP for federated communication.
The really niche one I like is S-expressions as a data format and configuration in place of json, yaml, toml, etc.
I am a big fan of Plaintext formats, although I wish markdown had a few more features like tables.
XMPP, RSS, …
XMPP is not a good protocol though. There’s a reason nobody uses it anymore.
I think it’s going to be interesting when the EU tries to enforce interoperability between the major messaging platforms. What are they going to do? They have some ridiculous targets like interoperable end-to-end encrypted group video calls in 5 years!
Yeah, Google and Faceebook EEE’d it.
Do elaborate.
XMPP is very old and was created when nobody knew about mobile phones. It worked more like true messaging app less than messages store ( unlike matrix ).
Requirement of permanent tcp ip connection doesn’t work well for mobile + pretty much useful feature in xmpp ( like message history ) is optional. If something doesn’t work in xmpp most people would blame xmpp / jabber rather than the lack of feature support in their server
Seriously? That’s your argument? So is the wheel.
I was under the impression PubSub was created for that.
Still, it’s an open extensible protocol.
They elaborated how that relates; usage scenario changed with mobile phones. XMPP is a bad match.
The X is for extensible, so are a whole bunch of other protocols and people haven’t stopped using them, they get improved upon (for the most part).
The mentioned permanent tcp ip connection (which you don’t neccessarily have on mobile) too?
I was under the impression XEP-0060 solves that.
Seriously, if you do take one verse from the whole response, you get straw men you fighting with.
I just told you that jabber / xmpp was created in the times almost nobody knew or believed mobile phones can be a thing. Thus it got created in that way: many similarities of xmpp and e-mail, irc or icq which didn’t stand the passage of time.
Of course, you’re right xmpp evolved to get PubSub extension as an “optional feature” but because of its availability (or rather lack) - most servers didn’t support it even the client did support, xmpp didn’t win the acceptance of the end-users. It got some attention in the business world (cisco jabber) but not in the retail.
Business cannot work forever without clients willing to pay or at least use, so it died off even in the business.
End of story, try not to fighting with the straw men you created.
That XMPP’s extensibility is in itself a strength and a weakness is indeed a valid argument, as you’ve exemplified. I was expecting you’d criticize OMEMO though…
No, it didn’t die off, it’s still used. IRC is still used as well, probably more or less at the same level. But if you define usage as “used in business” well then probably just a few cases, yes.
I hadn’t heard of Cisco Jabber but i’ve heard of Google and Facebook - both companies’ messengers were, initially, based on XMPP but they EEE’d it once they got enough users and walled their gardens, dealing a major blow to the protocol.
Can i fight my inner daemons at least? Please?
Can you please elaborate this point? I don’t understand what you mean by “true messaging app” and why that would be a bad thing?
Are you sure this is the case? Maybe back in the day, but my understanding is this isn’t true anymore
Why is user choice a bad thing? There’s a wealth of clients that implement the features you want
This may not be an important point, but from my experience, people always blame the client and not the underlying protocol. If I face an issue with my browser, I’d likely blame the browser before I blame http.
I use xmpp. It happens to be a great fit for a private family messaging service. Good interoperability between modern clients. I get that “nobody uses it” is hyperbole, but the internet is a big place and there is room for services without mass market appeal to thrive.
I and many others use it! And Google, meta, etc. Have used it but decided to lock it down.
Yes you’re right, there’s a reason people don’t use it as much, which is because these corporations embraced it, dominated it, then extinguished it.
But XMPP is honestly my favorite comm protocol and the most impressive imo.
For RSS I honestly don’t see a point, at least for me. What’s the use for having update feeds in a unified format when I still have to go to each fucking site to view the full text? I completely see the point of RSS when all I need is in the feed. But I hate going from different UI to different UI to get the full content. I want something like inoreader.com for self-hosting.
The content of the feed depends on the content creator, not on RSS.
I know that. But RSS is like 95% used for news feeds and that’s what I’m talking about. The way RSS is overwhelmingly used is making the whole thing useless (to me).
well, then just consider those giving shitty support for it as if they wouldn’t be supporting it at all
RSS works great for me though.
I have an app on my not-so-smart phone to read news when commuting. It is not a long journey so I just want to have a quick glance at the headlines and read the actual articles that I want to. There are only 6 sites that I am interested, but still will take quite some work to crawl from the proper websites. RSS in turn is unified so I don’t need to worry about their website layouts, formats, etc. It also gives me an URL to the actual content which I can use readability/reader mode library to parse and further reduce unnecessary contents.
Quite the opposite, I hope more informational sites offer/keep RSS! (Some removed RSS typically after a revamp, design change)
Mastodon offers rss for both keywords and users
This has nothing to do with RSS, it is the author’s choice. It’s like someone who posts links to their articles on Twitter / Facebook / Reddit, same thing. The platform doesn’t prevent you from putting the entire content there, and in fact, many do, especially with RSS.
One benefit of RSS though is that because it is an open protocol, the problem you mention already has solutions, which auto fetch the articles for you. That wouldn’t be possible without an open protocol like RSS
Moreover, I’d argue even with that, RSS is still a huge plus. To have all your content’s headlines in one UI, and potentially you can filter or sort them however you want, that’s pretty awesome.
Miniflux is likely to tick most of your boxes. It’s self hostable and can download the full article without extra clicks / having to visit the source.
Thanks, I’ll take a look. These days Inoreader also shows only the summary, making it useless for me.