I’ll start:
- RSS and blogs, news vs. social media
- XMPP vs. WhatsApp/FB messenger/Snapchat
- IRC vs. Matrix, Teams, Discord etc.
- Forums vs. Social media, Reddit, Lemmy(?)
Sadly, oftentimes, Forums are replaced by discord, despite… how different those are.
And, discord is inferior in so many ways. Not only you can’t easily search for the content, you also need an account on centralized proprietary software, that also is quite resource heavy. Not to mention the privacy concerns.
Discord servers are also closed communities which makes it impossible to search for info through search engine
Yep. It is a bit funny, and sad to see how we are regressing, despite the technology going forward…
There are opt in bots in deveopment that allows individual servers to be indexed for search engine visibility
trying to have an async conversation over time on Discord (and other IM solutions) is garbage compared to forum threads. While Discord added threading, in my experience not enough people have either adopted it ,or use it properly.
undefined> trying to have an async conversation over time on Discord (and other IM solutions) is garbage compared to forum threads. While Discord added threading, in my experience not enough people have either adopted it ,or use it properly.
I agree wholeheartedly, Discord is great for being a live chatroom, and for chatting over voice chat with friends, for any other purpose it is awful, and I am so baffled by so many product decisions to move to Discord. I feel like its a bunch of younger kids that played with their friends on it, and it has become the Hammer they use for every communication scenario, when most things are not nails.
It’s also very hard, if not impossible in some cases to find old conversations on discord, vs forums where they’re mostly preserved for eternity.
I’m hoping Discord is passing phase I can largely ignore. I will deal with it if I need to but it seems like world of proprietary crapware.
Software, services come and go, so maybe, soon enough…
The Thunderbird desktop mail client is far better (feature-rich, stable, interoperable) than any webmail or phone app mail client I’ve ever seen.
Microsoft Outlook, from what I’ve seen of it, is horrible compared to Thunderbird. Why anyone would use the former is beyond me. You can’t even easily see message headers, so how the hell are you supposed to know whether a message is legit?
Outlook
- hides email address => security issue; eases phishing (even beyond not showing whether it’s ensured valid)
- can’t have an inbox filter that moves emails and gives you a normal notification of unread email
- can’t have an inbox filter that is both server side and gives a desktop notification
- can’t save your reply email next to the replied to email in the inbox - but can in the folders
- can’t handle specific column orders (was it category before date then not working? sth like that)
I switched / had to switch at work. It works. I got used to it for the most part. But I’d much prefer using Thunderbird.
Because I’m using both now in both I never intuitively navigate to the delete button. Because the layout is different between the two.
Just wish it had native exchange activesync support, since we’re forced to use exchange accounts at work, and Microsoft no longer allows using M365 accounts directly via IMAP (you need to register applications in Azure that can instead use IMAP)
Stuck using BlueMail instead since it’s the only desktop client that mostly supports EAS. Aside from MailSpring but it had no calendar support despite being promised for years.
Can’t use Outlook since I’m on Linux and running a VM for it is a bit heavy. And I can’t stand outlook web.
RSS was absolutely the shit
Do people not use it anymore? I still do. I follow a boatload of different youtube channels, webcomics, blogs, etc. If there’s some other way besides RSS to have all of those updates show up on a single page, I don’t know it.
That’s what I used twitter for tbh. Since everyone is on it it’s easy to follow people, get instant updates and maybe even discover something new through the people you follow and their likes. It’s really a shame it went to shit, it was the lurkers perfect tool, especially when it comes to artists or content creators.
Not everyone is on twitter, but lots (all?) of Content Management Systems and blogs have a RSS feed.
As an academic, I’m syndicated to several labs and research groups which have their own websites, but don’t care about being visible on Twitter.
do birds fly? do ducks duck?
IRC is so rad. I learned to touch type by hanging out in IRC channels in the dark on a stolen shell account in 93. I felt like a hacker, really I was a goofball talking about rollerblading on a shell account that no one cared about because they got it for free with their SLIP account.
Honestly, if the FOSS community wants better adoption of these technologies, there needs to be an stronger emphasis on presentation and UI/UX.
The general public isn’t interested in using something that looks janky, behaves glitchy, or requires fiddling with settings to get looking nice.
Say what you want about that, I’m not defending it. I think people should care more about content and privacy/freedom vs just shiny things, but that isn’t the world we live in right now.
The big tech corpos know this, companies like Apple have become worth trillions by taking existing tech and making it shiny, sexy, and seamless.
Maybe that is just antithetical to FOSS principles. I don’t know what is the correct approach. All I know is I’ve heard so many folks who are curious about trying out FOSS software give it up because they encounter confusing, ugly, buggy user experiences.
Some FOSS products have figured this out, Bitwarden, Proton Mail, and Brave Browser have super polished and clean UX and generally are as or more stable than their closed-source counterparts.
Sad truth. I’m super happy with my FOSS experience overall, but I’m also a techie and very open to tinkering with stuff.
OP, I like several of your examples though. Lots of the old school tech is really solid. Just needs a clean fast front end in many cases.
My choice is Vim and its variants. Add some plugins, it’s a really great way to write code. I have no interest in GUI IDEs anymore since getting my NeoVim installation set up and tuned.
Linux will never be main stream popular unless it becomes pre-loaded on major brand laptops and computers, however good the desktop enviroments and apps are. This is the thing that doesn’t get much talk, but however seemless and easy to install most modern Linux distros people just aren’t installing their OS’ in the first place. Most people either get their OS pre-installed or ask their local Geek Squad to do it for them.
Valve basically proved this with the Steam Deck. Lots of folks were introduced unknowingly to Linux via that method and realized it’s pretty great.
But Valve worked and still work their asses off to get the Steam Deck UI/UX really nice. There were a lot of bumps early on, but things are really good now. Proton works amazingly well, and the look and feel of the Deck is incredible.
I have hope with Framework, System76, and other companies like that which are making computers that work well with, or exclusively are built for Linux. Hopefully they continue to grow the market.
Yes, absolutely, but sadly the Steam Deck and S76 workstations are still niche products, focusing on the gaming and SoftDev markets.
Framework is very promising and I hope they’ll succeed breaking into more mainstream markets. But I’m really saddend by Canonical and that they dropped the ball with it because back in the day they made some attempts to partner with larger laptop vendors to pre-load Ubuntu and I think it also had great promise even tho Linux software was not nearly as refines as it is today. But nowadays when the software is much more capable they focus their efforts almost exclusively on business / server side applications.
Even more frustrating that Chromebooks became a thing. It proved that consumers were ready to buy cheap notebooks with an OS that was basically just a browser and no significant computer power.
Any user-friendly Linux distro could have filled that role and done it much better IMO. That one always felt like on of Linux’s biggest misses recently. I don’t think it was anybody’s fault either. Google had the resources, the marketing, and the vision to push those, right place right time.
There might be some traction if those laptops and desktops were a little cheaper than those preloaded with Windows.
One issue is that Microsoft makes so much on data collection, that they actually pay manufacturers to put Windows on there, it’s one of the methods used to try to keep stock computer prices low. While this is scummy and anticompetitive, it helps the consumer and gives me a chuckle that installing Windows inherently decreased the worth of a computer.
True. The problem with that, is that Microsoft pays to have windows installed. Such that it’s actually cheaper to buy a system with windows and delete it than to buy one with Linux preinstalled.
Forums and Wikis vs. Discord
Yes I know, they shouldn’t serve the same purpose, but oftentimes nowadays
peoplecommunities use discord when they should use a forum or a wiki.Discord is not even remotely comparable and whoever think that it is (not saying you OP) don’t understand the basics on how internet works.
To put it simply:
You can’t search the content of a discord server on the publicly available internet. You need to be on discord and for that, the server need to continue to exists. To top it all, things you might search are written all over the place (channels, threads, etc) and the search is clearly the search is a “chat” search, as it should be, thus terrible to actually find what you need.
Rings a bell. Will check it out. Looks good at first glance.
XMPP is very underappreciated.
Agree on RSS.
Don’t have enough experience with XMPP.
IRC is not a secure protocol, I think matrix takes the cake there. (although I really miss IRC)
Lemmy and Reddit do have an upvote feature and aggregation across different topics / communites, which I think it’s what old school forums lacked.
The real problem with IRC had always been that it didn’t really scale. It’s fine for a few hundred people, but eventually shit just breaks.
Undernet in its heyday supported tens of thousands of people. But yeah, a system that relays absolutely all messages to absolutely all nodes is going to fall over under the weight of billions of users.
Vim. Hands down the best text editor / ide ever created. Come at me, Emacs.
USENET. Replacements aren’t distributed, or make discussion group discovery difficult, or don’t have decent native desktop clients, or some combination of those.
You know any good guides about how to get started with Usenet?
Because clients can present very different interfaces, it’s difficult to point to a single guide, but the basic principles are simple enough: get a client, point it at a server ( https://www.eternal-september.org/ provides a free one if your ISP no longer has its own, but it doesn’t carry the alt.binaries subhierarchy), download the list of available groups, subscribe to a few, read, and enjoy.
As for which client, I use Pan, but that’s Linux-specific. For other OSs, I haven’t a clue. If you happen to use Thunderbird for email, I think it still has the necessary support.
Keep in mind, though: USENET died in part from lack of good moderation options, so all you can do about bad actors and spam floods is block messages from those posters from being visible in your client. Moderated groups did exist, but the system basically amounted to one person having to okay every single message posted, which meant there was a single point of failure. For instance, when the moderator of rec.arts.anime.info died unexpectedly, it became impossible for anyone to post to the group.
90% of the news hierarchy is a wasteland these days anyway—I use it mostly for monitoring some of the mailing lists from my Linux distro, which happen to have a USENET repeater. The only other area doing well is the binaries groups.
If you’re interested in running a server, start by making sure you have a good-sized data pipe—I’m not sure what the average size of a feed is now, but ten years ago it was measured in the tens of gigabytes per day (mostly binaries).
You forgot the biggest most originalist one of all. Email.
Yes, often overlooked. And, I hear, almost impossible to selfhost these days without a degree in CS, because “we block all non big tech e-mail providers”.
Probably even with a CS degree.
It’s just a hassle to maintain, and too mission critical to have it go down.
I wonder if the same won’t happen with the fediverse, if we let some instances get too large.
I have a degree in CS… actually spent some time implementing email protocol as part of a class to send test messages through I think websockets in Java or something. It was really interesting and kind of a cool project.
Yeah, I ain’t touching that shit. I’ll more than happily let my domain name provider manage that for me so I can focus on
bigger and better thingsgoing through yet another Civilization 5 Vox Populi campaign.Going down isn’t the problem. Keeping an email server alive isn’t difficult.
Your messages getting summarily rejected by just about everyone is the problem.
I can’t quite find the blog post but I saw someone do a blog post using AWS’ map reduce on multiple servers to process a dataset… and then they redid their pipeline using bash, awk, and maybe grep and a single 8-core machine did it 100 times or so faster.
Edit: found it https://adamdrake.com/command-line-tools-can-be-235x-faster-than-your-hadoop-cluster.html
I think you can put this under the Linux command line. I.E. the bash shell and the commonly installed Linux command set. Way powerful for certain things.
I think this is more of a problem of knowing when a specific tool should be used. Probably most people familiar with hadoop are aware of all the overhead it creates. At the same time you hit a point in dataset sizes (I guess even more with “real time” data processing) where it’s not even feasible with a single machine. (at the same time I’m not too knowledgeable about hadoop and bigdata, so anyone else feel free to chime in)
I too prefer forums over news aggravators with comment trees.
Can you elaborate?
I personally vastly prefer the comment tree style of conversation - I’ve been online since the bulletin board era, but I can’t find myself going back to it ever again. I find it infinitely easier to follow a conversation when all the responses are in one place.
The communal feeling is indeed missing in news aggregators, though I’m not sure whether it’s more about the style of conversation or just me getting older and not being willing to invest time in online communities as much.
I spent a fair portion of my youth on unthreaded forums and I kinda miss the way that discussion could ramble and sidebar conversations would spawn within posts and weave in and out of the main topic. With threaded/tree-format forums, individual conversations are easier to follow, but you get far enough down any one branch of a conversation and it’s just two people arguing without any moderating input from the rest of the group.
Thanks for reminding me of that! I haven’t been around since the old old forum days, but from my time on Minecraft server Enjin forums, I definitely remember arguments going on, outside of the main discussion, and every once in awhile you’d get a ‘settle down you two’ from someone. The tree format kind of takes the ‘one big room, many conversations going on’ vibe away.
Not much. That’s the thing about FOSS—it keeps getting better. It is not subject to enshittification like e.g. Windows is.
