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!

  • Björn Tantau
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    1522 months ago

    RSS. It’s still around but slowly dying out. I feel like it only gets added to new websites because the programmers like it.

    • mesamune
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      262 months ago

      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…

    • @Static_Rocket
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      162 months ago

      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.

        • smpl
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          42 months ago

          It’s part of the RSS 2.0 standard. Of course it requires adoption by feed publishers.

          rssCloud

          • @[email protected]
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            42 months ago

            Oh neat! I didn’t know this existed. By any chance, do you know of any RSS readers that have implemented it?

            • smpl
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              22 months ago

              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.

      • @[email protected]
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        12 months ago

        I wouldn’t say that it never caught on. I run a feed reader and ~6% of feeds have WebSub. Most of these are probably wordpress.com blogs which include it by default.

        YouTube also sort of supports it, but they don’t really follow the standard so I don’t think it counts.

        But the nice thing about WebSub is that it is sort of an invisible upgrade to the existing feed (or any other HTTP URI) so it just works when blogs enable it.

        Most major feed reader services support it. One problem is that you need a stable URL to receive the notifications. So it is hard to make work with client-side readers. But I don’t think there is really a way around this other than holding a connection open to every feed you follow. So I would say that it does its job well. I don’t really see a need to get to 100% adoption or whatever. If you have a simple static-site blog that updates every month or so I don’t think it is a big deal that it doesn’t support WebSub.

  • @[email protected]
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    982 months ago

    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.

    • @Zer0_F0x
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      422 months ago

      Am sysadmin, can confirm I don’t wanna learn it.

      • KillingTimeItself
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        12 months ago

        not a sysadmin, but i admin a system or two, have yet to learn it myself, but will eventually learn it.

    • @[email protected]
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      2 months ago

      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.

    • @[email protected]
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      202 months ago

      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.

    • BaldProphet
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      162 months ago

      IPv6 is great, but NAT is quite functional and is prolonging the demise of IPv4.

      • @Alk
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        62 months ago

        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.

        • @SandroHc
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          42 months ago

          How can you bypass CGNAT?

          • @Alk
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            32 months ago

            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.

            • @ChilledPeppers
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              22 months ago

              Cloudflare tunnel, and its alternatives, such as localXpose, altho the privacy is probably questionable, and a many of them require a domain.

      • KillingTimeItself
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        12 months ago

        NAT is functional as long as you like NAT, which im pretty sure nobody likes, so uh.

          • KillingTimeItself
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            02 months ago

            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.

        • @[email protected]
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          192 months ago

          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.

        • lemmyvore
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          132 months ago

          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.

          • Dave.
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            2 months ago

            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.

            • Domi
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              22 months ago

              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.

            • KillingTimeItself
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              12 months ago

              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.

              realistically, it wouldnt surprise me if ISPs started NATing on residential IPV6 networks, just for the simplicity, but still allowed end users to assign their own IPs if they so pleased. Given the surge in shitty IOT devices, that’s probably a good thing for most people. Though a firewall would also accomplish this as well.

        • @[email protected]
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          22 months ago

          No. Stop spreading that myth. NAT does fuck all for security. If you want a border gateway, you can just have a border gateway.

    • folkrav
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      82 months ago

      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%.

      • @calcopiritus
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        42 months ago

        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.

  • Dessalines
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    2 months ago

    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.

    • xigoi
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      502 months ago

      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.

      • @[email protected]
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        242 months ago

        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.

      • Dessalines
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        112 months ago

        Most ppl have settled on Commonmark luckily, including us.

        • TechNom (nobody)
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          142 months ago

          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.

          • Dessalines
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            62 months ago

            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.

            • TechNom (nobody)
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              72 months ago

              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.

        • xigoi
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          2 months ago

          Have you read the CommonMark specification? It’s very complex for a language that’s supposed to be lightweight.

          • @[email protected]
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            22 months ago

            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.

            • xigoi
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              12 months ago

              An alternative would be a language with a simpler syntax. Something like XML, but less verbose.

              • @[email protected]
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                22 months ago

                And then we’ll be back to a hundred slightly incompatible versions. You need detailed specifications to avoid that. Why not stick to markdown?

                • xigoi
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                  12 months ago

                  Not if the language is standardized from the start.

    • southsamurai
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      192 months ago

      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.

      • Handles
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        82 months ago

        Just set up pandoc and Bob’s your uncle. It’ll convert markdown to anything. You’ll never have to open another word processor.

        • southsamurai
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          Nice! Thanks for the tip!

          Edit: holy shit, how have I never run across that before? That’s a brilliant program right there.

          • Handles
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            42 months ago

            Pandoc + [your markdown editor of choice] is magic. Some editors even come with Pandoc as a dependency so you can export to more or less anything from the GUI. I think GhostWriter and Zettlr at least (I honestly can’t be sure, I’ve changed editors so often and now I just have some Pandoc conversion scripts in my file manager menu).

      • Dessalines
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        52 months ago

        For sure, I bet full fledged editors like word don’t even let you import it.

        • southsamurai
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          22 months ago

          Not correctly, no. Librewriter does a bit better, but still misses some bits

      • @Pacmanlives
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        12 months ago

        Silly question why can’t you convert markdown to PDF and pass that to publishers?

        • southsamurai
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          42 months ago

          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.

    • CyclohexaneOPM
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      62 months ago

      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.

      • Dessalines
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        12 months ago

        Hedgedoc / hackmd support a good amount of extensions out of the box. I think typora and obsidias do also (but not open source).

    • Handles
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      62 months ago

      I frigging love markdown for everything!

      • Dessalines
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        32 months ago

        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.

    • @warmaster
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      52 months ago

      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.

    • @Aux
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      12 months ago

      The problem with Markdown is lack of quality software support. You don’t want to write a book in a text field on GitHub, Lemmy or Reddit. You want to write your book in MS Word or LibreOffice. Existing MD software is, to put it gently, an amazing pile of utter shit. If you’re not a software developer with an MD extension in VS Code, then you won’t use MD for anything.

      • @abruptly8951
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        12 months ago

        Obsidian? Also havent used it but logseq

        • @Aux
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          12 months ago

          These might work for some, but they’re not exactly an MS Word, aren’t they?

          • @abruptly8951
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            12 months ago

            Just as powerful and far less buttons imo. I can write a markdown doc in much less time than a word doc.

            What does word offer that isn’t easier with markdown?

            • @Aux
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              12 months ago

              It offers a familiar interface for people who have used it for many years.

              • @abruptly8951
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                12 months ago

                Yup, that seems to be about all it’s got going for it

  • x3i
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    692 months ago

    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.

    • TechNom (nobody)
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      312 months ago

      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.

    • @[email protected]
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      02 months ago

      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.

    • @[email protected]
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      82 months ago

      Because SecOps still thinks NAT is security, and NetOps is decidedly against carrying around that stupid tradition.

      • @[email protected]
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        22 months ago

        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.

      • KillingTimeItself
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        12 months ago

        bruh you could just use dyndns on ipv6 and call it a day, even more secure than ipv4 with NAT. lmao.

      • @spez_
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        -102 months ago

        Yeah I’m anti IPv6 so I’m not going to ever use it personally. Ipv4 is enough for me

      • @[email protected]
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        42 months ago

        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.

      • @calcopiritus
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        292 months ago

        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.

          • @calcopiritus
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            2 months ago

            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.

          • @droans
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            32 months ago

            Should be every single one that supports IPv6.

            • @[email protected]
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              For that matter, you should be getting an entire /60 at a minimum. Probably more like /56.

        • @jumjummy
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          22 months ago

          On the Internet, no. On my home LAN? Absolutely. I disabled all IPv6 at home.

      • @[email protected]
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        22 months ago

        Shortening rules actually make IPv6 addresses easier to remember than IPv4. Just don’t use auto configuration.

      • KillingTimeItself
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        22 months ago

        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.

  • @[email protected]
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    642 months ago
    • 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
    • @[email protected]
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      152 months ago

      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

      • ducklingone
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        112 months ago

        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

    • @[email protected]
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      2 months ago

      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.

      • KillingTimeItself
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        22 months ago

        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.

      • @[email protected]
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        12 months ago

        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.

        • @[email protected]
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          32 months ago

          I, on the contrary, think it’s cool for things to be universal, layered and reusable for different tasks.

  • @[email protected]
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    602 months ago

    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.

    • @[email protected]
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      182 months ago

      Nobody was going to honor that. That’s just giving them an extra bit of data to track you with.

          • qaz
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            Those cookie banners were introduced because of an EU law and are seen all over the world

            • @Tanoh
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              112 months ago

              Most of those cookie banners are not even needed, you only need them for tracking cookie, not login and session cookies. But of course everyone decided it is just easier to nag all the users with a big splash screen.

              A lot of them are not even doing it right, you are not allowed to hint the user that accept all is the “correct” choice by having it in a different color than the others. And being able to say no to all shouls be as easy as accepting all, often it isn’t.

              Basically, cookie banners are usually not needed and when they are they are most often incorrectlt designed (not by accident).

              • @[email protected]
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                42 months ago

                But of course everyone decided it is just easier to nag all the users with a big splash screen.

                Nope, the thing is, you’ll very rarely find a website that only uses technically necessary session/login cookies. The reason every fucking website, yes, even the one from the barber shop around the corner, has a humongous cookie banner is that every fucking website helps google and other corporations to track users across the whole internet for no reason.

            • @[email protected]
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              22 months ago

              Yes, seen by people visiting EU websites or companies with an EU presence. And because whether or not they assign a cookie is easily verifiable by the person on the other end.

  • @[email protected]
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    522 months ago

    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 :)

    • @[email protected]
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      22 months ago

      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.

  • मुक्त
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    522 months ago

    odf/odt/ods

    .md

    SimpleX

    Matrix

    OpenPGP

    Last, certainly not least… ActivityPub

    • Southern Wolf
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      122 months ago

      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.

      • @[email protected]
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        42 months ago

        markdown is standardized? I haven’t found two parsers that parse the same file the same for any but the most trivial documents

        • Southern Wolf
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          42 months ago

          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.

          • Norah - She/They
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            52 months ago

            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.

    • @[email protected]
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      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.

      Anyway it’s a chat protocol

        • KillingTimeItself
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          22 months ago

          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.

    • Handles
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      112 months ago

      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.

      • lemmyreader
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        222 months ago

        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.

  • ѕєχυαℓ ρσℓутσρє
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    402 months ago

    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.

      • @[email protected]
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        92 months ago

        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.

        • @[email protected]
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          42 months ago

          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?

          • @[email protected]
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            2 months ago

            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.

            • @[email protected]
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              -12 months ago

              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.

              • @[email protected]
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                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.

                • @[email protected]
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                  22 months ago

                  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!

          • KillingTimeItself
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            12 months ago

            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.

            • @[email protected]
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              12 months ago

              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

              • KillingTimeItself
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                12 months ago

                i suppose that’s the case, but if you ever partially open source something, i think you’re probably trying a little too hard.

    • @[email protected]
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      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.

    • folkrav
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      72 months ago

      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.

      • TechNom (nobody)
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        -12 months ago

        It really needs to significantly improve its live update capability. Typst is more capable in that regard.

    • CyclohexaneOPM
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      32 months ago

      Is it practical outside of academia? I heard the learning curve is kinda big

    • @[email protected]
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      12 months ago

      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.

    • Handles
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      12 months ago

      It’s basically ubiquitous in academia

      You mean STEM. In the humanities we do just fine without, tyvm.

        • KillingTimeItself
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          02 months ago

          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.

    • @olafurp
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      02 months ago

      I personally feel like it should be a standard extended markdown that allows latex code.

  • @[email protected]
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    402 months ago

    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.

    • @[email protected]
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      72 months ago

      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.

    • @[email protected]
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      42 months ago

      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.

    • @grue
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      22 months ago

      but it seems to mostly get adopted in very limited, locked down proprietary shit like Hue Lights.

      That’s the problem Matter and Thread are supposed to solve.

    • @Aux
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      12 months ago

      I actually don’t like ZigBee, it’s very unstable. It’s pretty much a shitty UDP implementation.

  • @[email protected]
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    312 months ago

    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.

    • @[email protected]
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      102 months ago

      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.

      • @[email protected]
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        32 months ago

        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.

        • TechNom (nobody)
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          12 months ago

          Conduit might be an option. It’s still under development. It’s also lightweight due to Rust (instead of Python as in Synapse).

          • @[email protected]
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            12 months ago

            Yeah I’ve been following that. It seemed at the time the project didn’t implement nearly all the specs as dendrite which was still lagging synapse.

            Might take another look though. I really did want to use it since it was written in rust. Seemed it should probably be more performant, everything else being equal.

    • @sandalbucket
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      32 months ago

      I love i2p. I wish it had more adoption / was easier to use.

  • @KISSmyOSFeddit
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    302 months ago

    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.

    • Handles
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      262 months ago

      That’d be nice of course. Personally, I just wish everything Microsoft would wither and go away.

    • TechNom (nobody)
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      162 months ago

      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.

    • @webjukebox
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      42 months ago

      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.

    • @[email protected]
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      12 months ago

      You do understand that all that is by design from Microsoft to ensure it’s incompatible so that they can f over the competition, right?