Does anyone else have the thought that maybe it’s time to just replace these 30+ year old ancient protocols? Seems like the entire networking stack is held together with string and duct tape and unnecessarily complicated.
A lot of the decisions made sense somewhat in the 80s and 90s, but seems ridiculous in this day and age lmao
I definitely would love to see a rework of the network stack at large but idk how you'd do it without an insane amount of cooperation among tech giants which seems sort of impossible
Seems like the entire networking stack is held together with string and duct tape and unnecessarily complicated.
The more you learn about network technology the more you realize how cobbled together it all is. Old, temporary fixes become permanent standards as new fixes are written on top of them. Apache, which was the most widely used web server for a long time, is literally named that because it was “a patchy” server. It’s amazing that any of it works at all. It’s even more amazing that it’s been developed to the point where people with no technical training can use it.
The open nature of IP is what allows such a varied conglomerate of devices to share information with each other, but it also allows for very haphazard connections. The first modems were just an abuse of the existing voice phone network. The internet is a functional example of building the airplane while you’re flying it. We try to revise the standards as we go, but we can’t shut the whole thing down and rebuild it from scratch. There are no green fields.
It has always been so. It must be so. It will continue to be so.
Same unfortunately goes for a big chunk of the law on a global scale… Constant progress, new possibilities and technologies, changes in general are really outpacing some dusted and constantly abused solutions. Every second goes by and any “somehow still holding” relic is under more pressure. As a species we can have some really great ideas but the long-term planning or future-proofing is still not our strongest suit.
I may be waaaay off here, but the internet as it exists is pretty much built on DNS, isn’t it? I mean, the whole idea of DARPANet back in the 60s and 70s was to build a robust, redundant, and self-healing network to survive nuclear armageddon, and except when humans f it up (intentional or otherwise), it generally does what it says on the tin.
Now, there’s arguments to beade about securing the protocol, but to rip and replace the routing protocols, I think you’d have to call it something other than the Internet.
You may remember Hilaria from such controversies as “how do you say in English, cu–cucumber?”. Born Hillary Lynn Hayward-Thomas in Boston, she somehow developed a Spanish accent once her parents retired to Spain in 2011.
Is this a thing? In MMA, a pro fighter from America called Mackenzie Dern married a Brazilian and adopted both the accent and the need for an English translator. There is also an English football manager called Steve McClaren that managed in the Netherlands, and infamously did an interview in broken English because “he thought locals would understand better”.
Mostly it’s not a real thing. Most people who speak multiple languages don’t get worse at one of them. Europe is full of multilingual people who speak like native speakers in their first language, and then near native in a bunch of other ones. There are times when you can’t tell what someone’s first language is.
On the other hand, it can happen a bit if you never use your native language, especially in the first few minutes of trying to switch. One famous example of that is Arnold Schwarzenegger who has spent so long in the US speaking English exclusively that his German has a slight American accent (though mostly it’s a heavy Styrian Austrian accent). Also, it is true that you can temporarily forget words, even in your native language. It’s not so much that you’re forgetting the word, just that your brain insists the object is a “pepino” (the Spanish word for cucumber) and for a moment you can’t say “ok, yeah, I know it’s pepino in Spanish, but what is it in English?”
But, “code switching” is a real thing. If an American moves to Australia, it’s really helpful to adopt some Australian pronunciations just to get by. If you ask for a “wah-der” in Australia, they’ll have to think for a second, if you ask for a “whoa-tah” they get what you want right away. Someone who speaks English fluently but is always among Brazilians who only speak a bit of English might use a subset of English to talk to them, use local phrasing that isn’t proper English but is Portuguese idioms or expressions moved into English word for word, and use Brazilian pronunciations so they’re understood more easily, even if those are mispronunciations under most English accents. But, it would be surprising if they couldn’t revert to normal English in an English-only setting.
It’s better. Not good. Better than other tools, at least in the eyes of the many people using it. But as I stated at another post, to me this speaks to the fact that we need better FOSS alternatives for whatever purposes discord is used. I don’t like Discord either, don’t get me wrong! But so many people using it means something’s missing and I don’t think it cab solely be explained by the lack of knowledge of existing solutions but at least partly by the existence itself.
It needs to be a big wave of migration, rather than convincing one individual at a time. Discord needs to shit the bed while there’s a tolerable/better alternative we can all agree on.
Tbh I don’t see that happening with matrix anyway. Even with discord going to shit.
Every platform that needs a guide is too complicated for the common folk.
This goes also for Lemmy. The users on Reddit that stayed either didn’t care about the whole API stuff or didnt understand the issue.
Hell even I use it sometimes because the content here is sparse and I don’t have any meaningful to contribute as a post (not even a repost lol)
We are the exception and putting up with reading a bit and then deciding where to start the camp.
Discord, FAANG, streaming sites. All of them and more are simply to register, login and then use. At best you will set up 2FA.
Most of the folks I know (even my boss of an IT company) do not register 2FA and if only because they are forced to (Google and MS/O365 does it for example).
I probably see another (commercial) platform rising before Matrix will become popular.
It’s harder for regular folk to move and they may not (yet) have an issue with what we may see, but regular folk would tolerate anything and tolerate it forever? They just have a different line which companies cannot cross.
I think (and admittedly, I hope) every proprietary software is destined to shit the bed due to the irresistible temptation to make the user’s experience worse for increased profit. If there’s no alternative then users have no choice but luckily many of us will even create useful software just as a passion. You may be right that we just have not created software aimed at them because it’s other tech people who give feedback/contribute.
the ironic thing is that basically the only thing that needs to happen for matrix to have that moment is some startup company to host a server much like discord, and then create a front end.
It’s literally something they’re capable of doing, and it would totally work. The ENTIRE backend is already done, they can even help contribute to matrix as well. The value is the customer base, not the open source code, so it’s not like it’s going anywhere.
It’s terrible for secure/private communications, it requires hacks that violate the TOS and EULA to modify the client to get rid of ads and change themes, it’s not FOSS, and it locks features behind a paywall…
But it does what skype already did, so I’m glad we all have to migrate to the new fad site that strips even more of our dignity and privacy every 10 years that’ll die anyway because it offers nothing and has a terrible business model.
People act like the alternatives are any better but they really aren’t. Sure don’t get me wrong it sucks that you typically have to scroll through useless info to find what you’re looking for, but I put that on the server owner, you see the same issue on most forums too. Discord brings huge audiences that you wouldn’t normally see in small communities. It’s free, easy to setup and access, has a mobile app with toggle-notifications(and maybe just my settings but I’ve never gotten an ad notification or anything I haven’t purposely toggled). People here are acting like you have to start using it as your primary messaging app and that you can’t just take your messaging to another platform if your worried about chat logs.
It’s bloated, filled with features no one needs for straight-forward work, has a somewhat obtuse UI and is buggy as hell. I don’t like Matrix much more than Discord. But even it has far fewer problems. I don’t know in which universe Discord is considered as ‘good’.
I use Discord mostly for arranging matches in Wiimmfi, but yesterday I used it to get help about an issue I had running Knightcrawler (selfhosted Torrentio for Stremio) with my specific setup and some kind people helped me out real quick.
Discord is a fucking plague. I loathe it for communities. As soon as there are more than 10 people in a room, no one can follow what anyone is saying. Threads? No dude, this isn’t the 90s! Let’s slack it up!!! 🤮
A bunch of the servers I’m on actively discourage the use of threads. No idea why. In a different server I’m on, an admin creates a thread for every post in general, so that people can talk about the post without cluttering up the main thread. I wish more servers followed that example.
Are we confusing threaded chat conversations with Threads, the FB/Snap Twitter with dreams of usurping federation to reach new ad contacts; or is it just me?
How the heck slack better or even have any more features than discord? Discord saves all history. Discord has threads that are easier to find than slack threads. Discord voice channels let you just hop in. Discord lets you direct reply.
I use slack for work, but Discord is great for what it is. The search is amazing.
All chat tools after irc have been trash for large communities. That includes slack. Irc somehow still works with 1500 people in it. I can not explain how. With a logging bot the discussions can be archived for google searchabillity. I guess that could be true for a discord or slack also, But i never seen it implemented. In most slacks i can not search more then 60 days back.
I wonder if it works like IRC. The “plague” this entire time has been servers. As soon as the idea only works because somebody, somewhere, is maintaining a server, cloud or hardware, then you’re kinda sunk. The server is the bottleneck. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen a AAA game launch only for the servers to be inadequate. It happens again and again and again, so I assume the business considerations push them toward having just enough server and maybe a little less, never extra, which costs money and cuts margins.
Somewhere there are a bunch of servers howling away in a room that are actually Discord, and Discord spends money to make them howl, so there’s never as much server as you want, which is why things start bogging down with too many people in the chat room at once.
Most importantly to a corporation, if you have to interact with their servers in order to do anything, then they can own the platform by owning the servers. So there’s always going to be a server, even if it’s not strictly needed. The same consideration goes through the head of the streamer who always wants to launch a Discord because it’s “free” but they can sell it to you and then have top level control of an entire community as an asset that can be sold to others. There’s always a server. There will be a server if the actual application doesn’t really need it.
The reason IRC works fine with 1500 people in a chat is because IRC uses the user’s machine for any sort of computation power it needs, and then everything else it is doing is just sending data across wires. There is no central server farm. I haven’t used IRC in a really, really long time, but if it hasn’t changed, then it also doesn’t support lots of picture posting, which helps. Most of the memory usage on my machine at idle is just too many Discord channels all needing to use my local RAM memory to store the umpteen thousand photos everyone has uploaded, all the memes and etc. The IRC I remember was text, and text uses so little data that it can be treated like zero data.
Lots of pictures are probably non-negotiable in the modern era. Heck, they’re pretty important for serious work tasks, like putting up a shot of the broken gadget, so the engineering team can get an eyeball on the failure, that means pictures are in, text-only isn’t viable. I don’t know if modern IRC supports this or not, it probably does if people are still using it at all.
But IRC is a piece of open-source software that you install on your machine, free to the user. It’s not a web app, it doesn’t live in a browser. The data of you interacting with others is being sent out to them and also back to you, where it shows up in your IRC client and the chat room. If 1500 people are using it, then 1500 people have each added some of their machine power to making it all work, so it scales, it always has as much hardware as it needs. Again, there’s no server in the middle to run out of capacity, so that problem is just bypassed.
Everything used to work like this, circa the late 1990s and early 2010s. Everyone was assumed to be on a PC of their own, and the only problem was how to connect them together to do stuff, like have deranged fan wars about shows. BBSs were already kind of old hat, and there’s that damn server again, every BBS has one. All the most clever apps of the 90s, even the web, managed to jump through hoops to avoid the necessity of a central server to get things done because then somebody has to pay for it, run it, maintain it and own it. We just want the wires, the lovely, lovely cables dragged across the sea at somebody else’s unthinkable expense. If you can eliminate the server somehow, then you win. And they did. Things like IRC and ICQ blew the hell up from using that model.
We really need to dig that entire concept back up and brush the dust off of it. I wonder if that’s what Matrix is.
Now if you’ll excuse me I need to go prune some pointless Discord channels. Oh, by the by, fucking nobody uses Slack, or knows what it is. Dudes on the internet all think it’s normal because tech offices seem to use it a lot, the rest of the world has never used Slack. Up until right now I was assuming that Discord and Slack are the same thing, owned by the same company, and Slack is just the “business casual” version of Discord. This doesn’t seem to be true, but that’s how unfamiliar I am with Slack, while being chronically online. There are probably more people around who still remember ICQ than have ever used Slack in their lives.
I love the Church of the Subgenius reference built into Slack’s name. From what I can tell, nobody who uses that thing actually gets any slack, it actively removes slack from your life and makes boss surveillance really, really easy for the boss, but you must always act as though Big Brother can hear, or you’re fucked. Good work Bob, nice joke. Anyway, I shut up now.
I found IRC loses chat flow more easily, as actual chat gets lost in the stream of blabber.
I am intrigued to see how threaded conversations in slack et al work, but haven’t been at a shop where slack was allowed as a tool due to data sovereignty and the CLOUD act.
But IRC was always something I approached reluctantly, and that’s been 31 years now.
It also seems to attract a younger crowd - I had to state my age to join one server and the mod screenshotted my info and everyone laughed calling me “boomer”. I’m only 40 (Millennial) and it wasn’t a gaming or specifically teen-server. It was a silly ironic European Reddit server.
The subreddit seems to have a range of ages. The Discord server is a bunch of kids commenting capybara and cat emojis like it’s funny. :/
I dunno why but they wanted you to comment your name, age and location in a welcome channel. I did and they screenshot and shared it in the main channel. Most of the people are around 16-19 with a few 20-25yo. I didn’t know that til I joined though!
I was very weird to be there apparently.
I just wanted to take the piss out of Europeans. There’s no age-limit in that.
While I understand why FOSS community hates Discord, I don’t know an alternative that is better at everything.
Discord’s main problems:
Not FOSS / Privacy respectful
Hard/Impossible to index/search for data and organize tech support
However alternatives we have are not ideal either:
Old-school web forums
Great for info archival / organized tech support
Separate accounts for every one of them, different sets of newsletters / email notifications. Basically, to efficiently be active on several forums you have to manually log in to each on regular basis and check what’s new
Due to slower pace of communication, it’s harder to just log in and “hang out” with community, everybody is more of a pen pal.
FOSS messaging applications (e.g. Matrix since that’s what most use)
Info archival is even worse then on Discord. Every time I tried to search for anything useful on Matrix I would give up due to poor results and HUGE delays for every search
Because most communities use a single Matrix chat, it’s a huge disorganized mess for any communication and tech support. There’s often 2-3 concurrent conversations in a single room and some just stop abruptly due to it getting confusing to keep up
it’s FOSS and Private, though
Feel free to downvote me for this, but I think that Github for support & issue tracking and Discord for community hang out spot is currently the lesser evil approach until better Foss tools arrive
Discord does have threads. I think the server admin has to enable them though. In rooms where it’s enabled, you can choose to post a thread or a regular message, and people can create a thread by replying to a regular message and choosing the option to make it a thread.
The most important downside for me is: I’m looking for some information about an issue I’m having or how to install or configure something and I find none. Because all the people talk behind closed doors and googling etc doesn’t help any more. Only solution is to join every Discord and platform before you start using your software and scrolling trough pages of chat messages.
I’d rather google for an error message and then be directed directly to an issue tracker where people discussed that specific problem.
Yep, that’s exactly why in the end of my comment I say that I currently believe a combination of Github+Discord to be best. Github for bug reporting, Discord if you want to socialize with the community, that’s what it does best
I’m somewhat fine with that. But you absolutely have to tell people to keep the discussions to random chatter and the absolute minimum then. (And internal talk maybe, if that’s of no interest to the public. Once it gets important or someone asks for advice that could be beneficial to others, the discussion on Discord needs to be interrupted and switch platforms. Or be copied to a Wiki after the fact.
Come on. That’s not even close to the amount of data that TikTok collects. TikTok needs to know how long you spend on EVERY video so it can recommend more like that. TikTok records EVERY interaction and time associated.
So you are suggesting forum software that supports single sign-on?
We are talking about an open source project, not a high school reunion. I don’t want to hang out with people, I want to have a discussion about a focused topic.
I want to ask a question and get an answer. If the question is not one that anyone online can currently answer, I want to be able to tell at a glance if anyone has talked about my question. If I don’t understand the answer, I want to ask a follow up question.
In the evening, I want to be able to take a look at new posts from that day, grouped by topic, to see if there is anything I find interesting or can weight in on.
With Discord (or any real time chat), it is hard to follow a single topic when more than one is being discussed. It is doubly hard to do so after the fact. I am aware that Discord has a forum feature. I have only seen one server ever enable it and no one posts anything to it.
Can’t you do everything you’ve listed on github though? Report bugs on issues tab, ask questions on discussions tab, following up is easy. Everything is also indexed by search engines and can be looked up later on.
I know, but this thread is about projects that don’t want to use GitHub as the center of discussion and use Discord instead. The Discussion tab need to be enabled.
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