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!
odf/odt/ods
.md
SimpleX
Matrix
OpenPGP
Last, certainly not least… ActivityPub
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.
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.
finger cyclohexane@lemmy.mlXMPP.
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…
IPv6
I mean, why the hell is IPv4 still a thing??
Try to remember a handful of them
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On the Internet, no. On my home LAN? Absolutely. I disabled all IPv6 at home.
For what?
::1
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.
Shortening rules actually make IPv6 addresses easier to remember than IPv4. Just don’t use auto configuration.
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.
I don’t even remember my old ICQ UIN. People usually do that.
So yes, bring in IPv6.
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.
Because ipv6 is yucky
Yeah I’m anti IPv6 so I’m not going to ever use it personally. Ipv4 is enough for me
It may be enough for you, but not for everybody.
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
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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.
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.
Many years ago I found Silc very interesting.
Hashcash
Idk I just wanna finger my server
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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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!
I’d love to see more adoption of… I2C!
Bazillions of motherboards and SBCs support I2C and many have the ability to use it via GPIO pins or even have connectors just for I2C devices (e.g. QWIIC). Yet there’s very little in the way of things you can buy and plug in. It feels like such a waste!
There’s all sorts of neat and useful things we could plug in and make use of if only there were software to use it. For example, cheap color sensors, nifty gesture sensors, time-of-flight sensors, light sensors, and more.
There’s
lmsensorswhich knows I2C and can magically understand zillions of temperature sensors and PWM things (e.g. fan control). We need something like that for all those cool devices and chips that speak I2C.If you have an unused VGA port, you can use the DDC pins for I2C. Be sure to add ESD protection if you do this. An I2C isolator would be even better.
I2C is really not meant to be used over cables. It has a very limited common mode input voltage range and it can’t handle much capacitance on the bus.
Except that in the case of VGA (and DVI, HDMI, and DisplayPort) the i2c interface is intended for use over the cable. All of those ports have a pair of i2c pins and corresponding wires in their cables. The i2c interface is used for DDC/EDID which is how the computer can identify the capabilities and specifications of the attached display. DDC even provides some rarely-used control functionality. Probably the most useful of which is being able to control the brightness of the display from software. I use the ddcci module on Linux and it lets me control my desktop monitor brightness the same way a laptop would, which is great. I have no idea why this isn’t widely used.
Edit:
This i2c interface is widely used to control the lighting on modern graphics cards that have RGB lighting. We’ve spent a lot of time reverse engineering these chips and their i2c protocols for OpenRGB. GPU chips usually have more i2c buses than the cards have display connectors, so the RGB chip is wired to one of the unused buses. I think AMD GPUs tend to have 8 separate i2c buses but most cards only use 4 or 5 of them for display connectors. There is also an i2c interface present on RAM slots normally used for reading the SPD chip that stores RAM module specifications, timings, etc. This interface is also used for RAM modules with controllable RGB lighting.
I2C is a bit goofy though. As a byproduct of being an undiscoverable bus you basically just have to poke random addresses and guess what you’re talking to. The fact lmsensors i2c detection works as well as it does is a miracle. (Plus you get the neat issue where even the act of scanning the bus can accidentally reconfigure endpoints)
Yeah, the lack of proper discoverability on i2c truly sucks. You have to just poke random addresses and hope for the best to see if an i2c device exists on the bus. It’s a great standard but I wish it would get updated with some sort of plug and play autodetection feature. Standardized device PID/VID system like USB and PCI would be acceptable or a standardized register that returns a part string. Anything other than blindly poking registers and hoping you’re not accidentally overvolting the CPU or whatever because the register on your expected device overlaps with the overvolt the CPU register on the same address of a different device.
Remember SOAP? Remember XML-RPC? Remember CORBA?
Those were not very good.
I had to do some soap integration last year and it feels like it only got worse with age.
I’m really into CloudEvents because I love event-driven systems, and since events can come from, or be consumed by, so many different services, having a robust spec is super duper useful.
So what problem is this solving? What are some event-driven systems that need to interoperate? Seems like even if you have a common encapsulation method, you still need code to understand and deal with the message body. Just seems like an extra layer around a JSON blob.
Why should this be at the editor level? There should be a linter that applies all these stylistic formatting changes to all files automatically. If the developer’s own editing tools or personal workflow have a chance to introduce non-standard styles to the codebase, you have a deeper problem.
Why should this be at the editor level?
Because for every programming language there’ll be people using text editors, but you’ll never succeed in even creating code formatters for them all.
The greatness in this project is in aiming low and making things better through simple achievable goals.
XMPP
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.
Call me old fashioned, but I still call it Jabber.
🙂
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.
