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Ask HN: Which internet protocol do you miss in the modern days?
HTTP has taken over the world. Which old internet protocols do you miss in the modern days? Maybe FTP? NNTP?
Sure we can still find FTP and NNTP servers around but let's face it, they aren't mainstreams anymore.
So my question is to find out if there are some internet protocols that you absolutely loved but you don't get to use much these days.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- LinuxBender 2y agoI still use all the protocols so I do not miss them. The majority of consumer services do revolve around HTTP but in my opinion that has not deprecated anything. It just means HTTP is more popular but as you say all the other protocols are still there. HTTP(s) has reduced friction for the majority and simplified coding. I actually like that the other protocols are less favored as I can share something over one of them and know that my servers will not be overloaded. People today won't bother using less popular protocols unless they absolutely really want access. That weeds out bots and low effort clients. Sometimes I want a level of friction to be a great filter so to speak. Sometimes I will use FTPS or SFTP or native Rsync and someone has to be really interested to bother. This is especially useful if my target audience are highly technical people or non-cellphones. There are phone apps that speak all off the protocols but most people will not install and configure them on a whim. An example would be: I share a set of files on a chat server. The chat server has bots that can crawl HTTP(s) but they know not how to speak SFTP. Only the real human will bother. That's probably a long winded way of indirectly answering your question. My favorite protocols are anything that raise the bar to access. In some regard it brings back the old internet for me and weeds out some of the riffraff. This probably sounds elitist but that is not my intention.
- jprd 2y agoGopher and finger.
- CRConrad 2y agoNNTP, and the Usenet built on it.
- okasaki 2y agoIRC. I mean I still use it, but I wish it was more common.
- JohnFen 2y agoNNTP for sure. I also miss anonymous ftp servers, but I don't really miss FTP that much. Very nearly everything I used it for can be done as easily with SCP. And although far from dead, the decline of RSS is a genuine tragedy.
- brodouevencode 2y agoSame here. The newsgroups were much more _sane_ too for almost all types of discourse.
- solardev 2y agoI grew up at the tail end of gopher, and kinda wish I saw it in its heyday. HTTP and HTML are so complicated. I still think it'd be nice if there were a text-focused alternative internet... even if not gopher, WAP (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Application_Protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Application_Protocol) would've been nice, at least more so than AMP. I also miss XPath (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XPath https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XPath). It's still around, but CSS selectors have taken over most everyday use cases. But for writing frontend tests or scrapers, XPath can still be very handy. I guess it's not really a "protocol", but IMO it was a good standard that saw too little real-world uptake.
- epc 2y agofinger. Four11 (not a protocol but I have this dim recollection of being able to point ldap at it before Yahoo bought them).
- caprock 2y agoI miss the prevalence of telnet and finger. There are still plenty of telnet accessible services, but not as commonly as before.