4 ms·

I wish Discord was affected by the DMA so we could get some kind of official interoperability.

by davikr 3y ago

Sakos 3y ago
It's crazy how the 00s was this golden age of interoperability. You could use almost every messaging service with a third party client. Now all we have is walled gardens.
- kmlx 3y ago
  i was there, i was developing on those systems. i think you're romanticising things. the whole situation with interoperability was not sustainable, as evidenced by the fact that it was dropped by every player as soon as possible. one of the reasons why it was not sustainable was that the standards at that time were conceived for a different era, and everyone wanted special features not available in the standards. it does seem like we're having much better success with interoperability nowadays, but only because the standards are much better today.
  - thomastjeffery 3y ago
    No, people left because a large enough percentage of their friends and coworkers did. That's how walled gardens work: exclusivity demands participation.
    - kmlx 3y ago
      you're describing the "network effect". but it only happens once people actually move away from certain platforms. why did they move away? features that couldn't be implemented using a shared standard.
      - thomastjeffery 3y ago
        "move away" is a tenuous assertion. If someone puts the majority of new content on another platform, is that "moving away"? What if they only use the old platform once a week? What if they only use the new platform once a week, but that's when an important discussion happens? No one moved away from email.
        kmlx 3y ago
        > If someone puts the majority of new content on another platform, is that "moving away"? yes. > What if they only use the old platform once a week? What if they only use the new platform once a week, but that's when an important discussion happens? you’re describing low usage.
        thomastjeffery 3y ago
        My point is that it's still the network effect, even when the old platform still has active users. Nobody left email, yet the network effect is still very present in that space.
  - guappa 3y ago
    Players always drop it to trap their users to their service. See how google closed hangouts to being able to communicate with other XMPP servers, or how slack dropped IRC and XMPP when they felt they had enough adoption to be able to do that. So in the beginning you want interoperability so it's "just the same", then you drop it so the users are stuck.
    - kmlx 3y ago
      > Players always drop it to trap their users to their service. i understand what you're writing and i agree. but in my case all our enterprise clients were demanding features that had us circumventing interoperability since the features they were asking for would never make it into the standards.
  - Sakos 3y ago
    > i think you're romanticising things. I don't think I am. As a user, I could use Pidgin or Gaim and talk to my friends across every service I used. This only stopped when companies started consciously working against these efforts. Discord explicitly and openly banned third party clients. They didn't have to do so. It has nothing to do with standards and everything to do with companies becoming aggressively and openly hostile towards anything that isn't directly under their control.
    - kmlx 3y ago
      > They didn't have to do so. It has nothing to do with standards and everything to do with companies becoming aggressively and openly hostile towards anything that isn't directly under their control. we tried to do it differently. it was impossible. every company had it’s own extensions on top of the standards because the standards were poor. those extensions only worked when chatting with someone on the same network using the same software. this was not sustainable. when we removed those standards we not only provided an incredible experience for the user but we also removed huge amounts of code that made everything much faster. the casualty was interoperability.
- DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
  > You could use almost every messaging service with a third party client Not because of open-standards - but because that was when IM protocols were straightforward to reverse-engineer and interop with, and this was before mass-adoption of SSL/TLS (let alone certificate-pinning).
aurareturn 3y ago
What product do you work on? Let’s make that DMA as well.
- yesyessickospng 3y ago
  I work on an opensource ssh server, so I don't think that it really matters if it were to somehow be affected by the DMA, as its an open standard and interoperates with opensource options, which hasn't killed the company I work for. If discord cant compete with email because its too hard to comply with open standards, maybe that particular rent seeking chat app wasn't actually all that innovative
  - joshuamorton 3y ago
    Email is good for a very particular set of things. Those things (including the way it is open and standardized) also make it very very bad for a lot of other things. For example, I don't need a spam filter on my discord. My signal is actually encrypted reasonably and provides reliably secure communication. I can send things like gifs and emoji in-line in a reliable, cross-platform way. Group communication isn't cursed, "top- or bottom- posting" isn't a thing people discuss. Requiring people to build only on widely accepted standards prevents any kind of innovation in features, because before you can ratify anything, you have to get it approved by everyone else, which means that you're now in a land of super-ultra-waterfall design-by-committee that gives everyone the least-common-denominator communication features. That isn't good.
unstatusthequo 3y ago
Where do people get this notion that every system has to work with their competitors’ system? Genuinely curious. Why would I spend resources making sure to accommodate connection to something that competes?
- Sakos 3y ago
  1) It used to work that way. You didn't even have to put in special effort. It takes more effort to do what these companies do today to ensure nobody can interface with their service. 2) Apparently we need regulation to make companies do it today, and that will force these companies to allow interoperability.
  - shagie 3y ago
    What would it take to get gcc to export its AST so that greater interoperability could be achieved with other FOSS packages (like Emacs)? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8861360 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8861360 (one of the indexes of the issue)
  - aurareturn 3y ago
    I didn't remember AIM being able to send messages to MSNor ICQ.
    - Sakos 3y ago
      https://appleinsider.com/articles/11/12/14/microsoft_opens_messenger_to_xmpp_allowing_apple_to_connect_ichat_ios_clients https://appleinsider.com/articles/11/12/14/microsoft_opens_m... This is what the internet used to be like. Nowadays, something like this would be unthinkable. But you could use Pidgin to connect to Facebook Messenger, AIM, ICQ and MSN. No, you couldn't necessarily use your AIM account to talk to somebody on FB, but that was only because the companies making these services didn't implement this. The fact is, it could've been done if they wanted. The technology was there, the environment was there, the open standard that almost everybody was using was there. https://superuser.com/questions/717272/is-it-possible-to-talk-to-aim-users-with-any-jabber-client-via-any-jabber-accoun https://superuser.com/questions/717272/is-it-possible-to-tal... Now you have Discord, Facebook, etc. banning third party clients and enforcing a walled garden when they don't have to. It's a conscious choice they're making. I'm not sure why you're defending the current state of things. It's worse now.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
hackable_sand 3y ago
ActivityPub discord would be lit
- anticensor 3y ago
  A friend of mine is already working on such a project.

I wish Discord was affected by the DMA so we could get some kind of official interoperability.

by davikr 3y ago

I wish Discord was affected by the DMA so we could get some kind of official interoperability.

It's crazy how the 00s was this golden age of interoperability. You could use almost every messaging service with a third party client. Now all we have is walled gardens.

kmlx 3y ago
i was there, i was developing on those systems. i think you're romanticising things. the whole situation with interoperability was not sustainable, as evidenced by the fact that it was dropped by every player as soon as possible. one of the reasons why it was not sustainable was that the standards at that time were conceived for a different era, and everyone wanted special features not available in the standards. it does seem like we're having much better success with interoperability nowadays, but only because the standards are much better today.
- thomastjeffery 3y ago
  No, people left because a large enough percentage of their friends and coworkers did. That's how walled gardens work: exclusivity demands participation.
  - kmlx 3y ago
    you're describing the "network effect". but it only happens once people actually move away from certain platforms. why did they move away? features that couldn't be implemented using a shared standard.
    - thomastjeffery 3y ago
      "move away" is a tenuous assertion. If someone puts the majority of new content on another platform, is that "moving away"? What if they only use the old platform once a week? What if they only use the new platform once a week, but that's when an important discussion happens? No one moved away from email.
      - kmlx 3y ago
        > If someone puts the majority of new content on another platform, is that "moving away"? yes. > What if they only use the old platform once a week? What if they only use the new platform once a week, but that's when an important discussion happens? you’re describing low usage.
        thomastjeffery 3y ago
        My point is that it's still the network effect, even when the old platform still has active users. Nobody left email, yet the network effect is still very present in that space.
- guappa 3y ago
  Players always drop it to trap their users to their service. See how google closed hangouts to being able to communicate with other XMPP servers, or how slack dropped IRC and XMPP when they felt they had enough adoption to be able to do that. So in the beginning you want interoperability so it's "just the same", then you drop it so the users are stuck.
  - kmlx 3y ago
    > Players always drop it to trap their users to their service. i understand what you're writing and i agree. but in my case all our enterprise clients were demanding features that had us circumventing interoperability since the features they were asking for would never make it into the standards.
- Sakos 3y ago
  > i think you're romanticising things. I don't think I am. As a user, I could use Pidgin or Gaim and talk to my friends across every service I used. This only stopped when companies started consciously working against these efforts. Discord explicitly and openly banned third party clients. They didn't have to do so. It has nothing to do with standards and everything to do with companies becoming aggressively and openly hostile towards anything that isn't directly under their control.
  - kmlx 3y ago
    > They didn't have to do so. It has nothing to do with standards and everything to do with companies becoming aggressively and openly hostile towards anything that isn't directly under their control. we tried to do it differently. it was impossible. every company had it’s own extensions on top of the standards because the standards were poor. those extensions only worked when chatting with someone on the same network using the same software. this was not sustainable. when we removed those standards we not only provided an incredible experience for the user but we also removed huge amounts of code that made everything much faster. the casualty was interoperability.
DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
> You could use almost every messaging service with a third party client Not because of open-standards - but because that was when IM protocols were straightforward to reverse-engineer and interop with, and this was before mass-adoption of SSL/TLS (let alone certificate-pinning).

aurareturn 3y ago

What product do you work on? Let’s make that DMA as well.

yesyessickospng 3y ago
I work on an opensource ssh server, so I don't think that it really matters if it were to somehow be affected by the DMA, as its an open standard and interoperates with opensource options, which hasn't killed the company I work for. If discord cant compete with email because its too hard to comply with open standards, maybe that particular rent seeking chat app wasn't actually all that innovative
- joshuamorton 3y ago
  Email is good for a very particular set of things. Those things (including the way it is open and standardized) also make it very very bad for a lot of other things. For example, I don't need a spam filter on my discord. My signal is actually encrypted reasonably and provides reliably secure communication. I can send things like gifs and emoji in-line in a reliable, cross-platform way. Group communication isn't cursed, "top- or bottom- posting" isn't a thing people discuss. Requiring people to build only on widely accepted standards prevents any kind of innovation in features, because before you can ratify anything, you have to get it approved by everyone else, which means that you're now in a land of super-ultra-waterfall design-by-committee that gives everyone the least-common-denominator communication features. That isn't good.

unstatusthequo 3y ago

Where do people get this notion that every system has to work with their competitors’ system? Genuinely curious. Why would I spend resources making sure to accommodate connection to something that competes?

Sakos 3y ago
1) It used to work that way. You didn't even have to put in special effort. It takes more effort to do what these companies do today to ensure nobody can interface with their service. 2) Apparently we need regulation to make companies do it today, and that will force these companies to allow interoperability.
- shagie 3y ago
  What would it take to get gcc to export its AST so that greater interoperability could be achieved with other FOSS packages (like Emacs)? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8861360 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8861360 (one of the indexes of the issue)
- aurareturn 3y ago
  I didn't remember AIM being able to send messages to MSNor ICQ.
  - Sakos 3y ago
    https://appleinsider.com/articles/11/12/14/microsoft_opens_messenger_to_xmpp_allowing_apple_to_connect_ichat_ios_clients https://appleinsider.com/articles/11/12/14/microsoft_opens_m... This is what the internet used to be like. Nowadays, something like this would be unthinkable. But you could use Pidgin to connect to Facebook Messenger, AIM, ICQ and MSN. No, you couldn't necessarily use your AIM account to talk to somebody on FB, but that was only because the companies making these services didn't implement this. The fact is, it could've been done if they wanted. The technology was there, the environment was there, the open standard that almost everybody was using was there. https://superuser.com/questions/717272/is-it-possible-to-talk-to-aim-users-with-any-jabber-client-via-any-jabber-accoun https://superuser.com/questions/717272/is-it-possible-to-tal... Now you have Discord, Facebook, etc. banning third party clients and enforcing a walled garden when they don't have to. It's a conscious choice they're making. I'm not sure why you're defending the current state of things. It's worse now.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

hackable_sand 3y ago

ActivityPub discord would be lit

anticensor 3y ago
A friend of mine is already working on such a project.