3 ms·

Beware of the enshittification though, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42182271 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42182271

PaulHoule 2y ago
I'm worried and I'm not. The natural cycle of communication apps is that people use them for a while and then the vendor stops maintaining and people keep using them for a while until something new comes along and then it is too late for the old app. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-sided_market https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-sided_market If you were born in 2000 you might be excused for realizing that somebody born in the 1970s may have used Compuserve The Source Unafilliated BBSes Fidonet Various chat applications for UNIX and VMS USENET IRC CuSeeMe ICQ AOL Instant Messenger MSN Instant Messenger Facebook Instant Messenger 10+ off-brand MSFT chat applications (When you have so many even Skype and Teams are off brands!) PalTalk Tivejo (fork of the above with a user registration system that I wrote) Go2Meeting and many other "chat" application. In the last few years Facebook and other big tech companies have been unusually good at slamming the door to competition and perhaps we've seen an influx in "normies" who haven't lived through a normal cycle and who believe it is possible or desirable you're going to stay loyal to a chat application the same way your dad stayed loyal to Old Spice. It has nothing to do with proprietary vs open source, as open source products (say GNOME) are frequently run by people who couldn't care what the users think. It's got less to do with the profit motive than it has to do with penny pinching, in fact non-profits burn out before for-profits because at lest the for-profits have a motivation structure for people to improve things and non-profits by definition do not. It's a fair assumption that Bluesky is going to suck in 10 years just as none of the things above had more than 10 years. Bluesky is going to spend a dollar on me and all the other (roughly) 15 M users they have now and there's no reason you shouldn't enjoy it now any more than you should let awareness of your mortality spoil all the joys you could be having right now. It's an interesting question to what extent an "open" platform can resist this. I like the system of POTS and text messaging which is highly interoperable between carriers but has proven to be co-optable by the likes of Facetime. In theory you could have brisk competition in Mastodon clients but we have been that way with IRC, XMPP and RSS where clients have not improved in 20 years. Email is a nominally open protocol but Gmail's dominance makes it not so if you care about getting your mail delivered.
- MattJ100 2y ago
  > In theory you could have brisk competition in Mastodon clients but we have been that way with IRC, XMPP and RSS where clients have not improved in 20 years. This is an often-repeated myth. I have a lot of experience with XMPP, and I can tell you that many of today's clients are unrecognisable compared to equivalents 20 years ago. Then IRCv3 is a thing in multiple IRC clients and networks. RSS, well, I'm not sure how much evolution is needed there anyhow. By longevity, the most successful networks have all been open ones. The proprietary ones come and go.
  - PaulHoule 2y ago
    What I have seen with XMPP is major uptake with law enforcement and military. Lots of custom systems there. RSS is a great protocol to talk about, it's not such a great protocol to use. Right now my RSS reader subscribes to about 110 feeds for 10 cents a month per feed through Feedburner which does all the crawling for me and just hits a websocket when a new article comes in which posts it to SQS. When I want to add new articles to my database I just suck 'em out. It's a bargain for feeds like MDPI and arXiv and the Guardian that have many articles per day but I could not afford to subscribe to the 2000+ indie blogs that I'd like to subscribe to and that YOShInOn could easily find articles I find interesting in. I could write my own RSS crawler and probably will at some point but it is a hassle. I can crawl frequently and make my home internet unusable or I can crawl infrequently and have stale results. Worse yet if a feed changes rapidly I might even miss updates completely. I can define some loss function that lets me find an optional combination of "doesn't poll too fast" and "isn't too stale" for each feed individually but I expect to experience both the consequences of underpolling and overpolling unless I make a definite decision that I am going to underpoll or overpoll by a few order of magnitude. There was so much fighting between RSS and ATOM in terms of the exact syntax of the records but none about the problem of polling and polling and polling and polling. Confront Dave Winer with ActivityPub or AT protocol and it is like you are showing somebody a car and they don't want to hear about the engine and the brakes and all that they just want to know where to hitch the horse.
- fsflover 2y ago
  You forgot to include email in your list, which is well and alive. Incidentally, it's distributed and open, too.

PaulHoule 2y ago

I'm worried and I'm not. The natural cycle of communication apps is that people use them for a while and then the vendor stops maintaining and people keep using them for a while until something new comes along and then it is too late for the old app. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-sided_market https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-sided_market If you were born in 2000 you might be excused for realizing that somebody born in the 1970s may have used Compuserve The Source Unafilliated BBSes Fidonet Various chat applications for UNIX and VMS USENET IRC CuSeeMe ICQ AOL Instant Messenger MSN Instant Messenger Facebook Instant Messenger 10+ off-brand MSFT chat applications (When you have so many even Skype and Teams are off brands!) PalTalk Tivejo (fork of the above with a user registration system that I wrote) Go2Meeting and many other "chat" application. In the last few years Facebook and other big tech companies have been unusually good at slamming the door to competition and perhaps we've seen an influx in "normies" who haven't lived through a normal cycle and who believe it is possible or desirable you're going to stay loyal to a chat application the same way your dad stayed loyal to Old Spice. It has nothing to do with proprietary vs open source, as open source products (say GNOME) are frequently run by people who couldn't care what the users think. It's got less to do with the profit motive than it has to do with penny pinching, in fact non-profits burn out before for-profits because at lest the for-profits have a motivation structure for people to improve things and non-profits by definition do not. It's a fair assumption that Bluesky is going to suck in 10 years just as none of the things above had more than 10 years. Bluesky is going to spend a dollar on me and all the other (roughly) 15 M users they have now and there's no reason you shouldn't enjoy it now any more than you should let awareness of your mortality spoil all the joys you could be having right now. It's an interesting question to what extent an "open" platform can resist this. I like the system of POTS and text messaging which is highly interoperable between carriers but has proven to be co-optable by the likes of Facetime. In theory you could have brisk competition in Mastodon clients but we have been that way with IRC, XMPP and RSS where clients have not improved in 20 years. Email is a nominally open protocol but Gmail's dominance makes it not so if you care about getting your mail delivered.

MattJ100 2y ago
> In theory you could have brisk competition in Mastodon clients but we have been that way with IRC, XMPP and RSS where clients have not improved in 20 years. This is an often-repeated myth. I have a lot of experience with XMPP, and I can tell you that many of today's clients are unrecognisable compared to equivalents 20 years ago. Then IRCv3 is a thing in multiple IRC clients and networks. RSS, well, I'm not sure how much evolution is needed there anyhow. By longevity, the most successful networks have all been open ones. The proprietary ones come and go.
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  What I have seen with XMPP is major uptake with law enforcement and military. Lots of custom systems there. RSS is a great protocol to talk about, it's not such a great protocol to use. Right now my RSS reader subscribes to about 110 feeds for 10 cents a month per feed through Feedburner which does all the crawling for me and just hits a websocket when a new article comes in which posts it to SQS. When I want to add new articles to my database I just suck 'em out. It's a bargain for feeds like MDPI and arXiv and the Guardian that have many articles per day but I could not afford to subscribe to the 2000+ indie blogs that I'd like to subscribe to and that YOShInOn could easily find articles I find interesting in. I could write my own RSS crawler and probably will at some point but it is a hassle. I can crawl frequently and make my home internet unusable or I can crawl infrequently and have stale results. Worse yet if a feed changes rapidly I might even miss updates completely. I can define some loss function that lets me find an optional combination of "doesn't poll too fast" and "isn't too stale" for each feed individually but I expect to experience both the consequences of underpolling and overpolling unless I make a definite decision that I am going to underpoll or overpoll by a few order of magnitude. There was so much fighting between RSS and ATOM in terms of the exact syntax of the records but none about the problem of polling and polling and polling and polling. Confront Dave Winer with ActivityPub or AT protocol and it is like you are showing somebody a car and they don't want to hear about the engine and the brakes and all that they just want to know where to hitch the horse.
fsflover 2y ago
You forgot to include email in your list, which is well and alive. Incidentally, it's distributed and open, too.