90% of the bullshit mass emails at my work could be an RSS feed.

Theres quite a few sites that still use it and existing ones in the Fediverse have it built in (which is really cool). But your right, the general public have no concept of having something download and queue up on a service rather than just going to the site. And the RSS clients are all over the place with quality…

WebSub (formerly PubSubHubbub). Should have been a proper replacement for RSS with push support instead of polling. Too bad the docs were awful and adopting it as an end user was so difficult that it never caught on.

Because ipv6 is yucky

Try to remember a handful of them

Removed by mod

Nobody knows about unifiedpush. Last time I checked, their Linux dbus distributor also wasn’t ready. There has to be a unified push to get it adopted.

Fuck Unified Push. Just use the Web Push standard. https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8030

It is what is used for browser push messages, is already widely supported. Is compatible with existing push infrastructure and users and is end-to-end encrypted. IDK why Unified Push felt the need to create a new protocol when a perfectly good one already existed.

Although there is no “client side” spec. The Unified Push client side could be useful. But they should throw away their custom backend protocol and just use Web Push.

I think Obsidian and Logseq are helping to change this.

Man, I’ve written three novels plus assorted shorter form stories in markdown.

There’s a learning curve, but once you get going, it’s so fluid. The problem is that when it comes time to format for release, you have to convert to something else, and not every word processor can handle markdown. It’s extra work, but worth it, imo.

Markdown is terrible as a standard because every parser works differently and when you try to standardize it (CommonMark, etc.), you find out that there are a bajillion edge cases, leading to an extremely bloated specification.

Yup. Way too many people using different chat apps. I’ve bridged most of them but still annoying.

For business email is thankfully still pretty common. But some of them try to push you to one of the Facebook messengers.

I want an open widely used chat app ASAP.

The problem with IPFS is that kubo sucks. I used it for a while and it is always burning CPU doing nothing, failing to publish anything to the DHT and fetching files is slow. GC collects files that are supposed to be “pinned” by existing in MFS and so many other bugs all of the time.

I would love to see a new server take off that was built with quality in mind.

I think the core protocol is pretty good (although I think they should have baked in encryption) but even the mid-level protocols like UnixFS and DAG whatever are mired in constant change for no real reason as the developers jump on new fads.

I really hope matrix gets native VoIP. I saw like 2 years ago it was in beta, haven’t kept up with it though. I’d also really like voice channels like discord so my friends and I can replace discord but it seems like matrix isn’t interested in being a discord replacement

That’d be nice of course. Personally, I just wish everything Microsoft would wither and go away.

The entire purpose of Microsoft standardizing OOXML and implementing it wrongly in Office was to make other office suites irrelevant. ODF was already standardized and countries would have adopted it if MS didn’t do the same with OOXML. They stuffed the ISO with members supporting them to do it.

And now that OOXML is a viable standard, they implement it wrongly so that other office suites can’t be compatible with MS Office without a lot of extra effort. Any incompatibilities with MS Office will be considered as the fault of other office suites by the general public and government officials.

Expecting MS to do what’s right for the customers is putting too much faith in their nonexistent sense of ethics.

I’d like to interject for a moment. What you’re referring to as FTP is, in fact, smelly hot garbage.

For context, I wrote this while waiting for a migraine to pass. I was angry at my brain for ruining my morning, and I like to shit on FTP. It’s fun to be hyperbolic. I don’t intend for this to be an attack on you, I was just bored and decided to write this ridiculous rant to pass the time.

I must once again rant about FTP. I’ve no idea if you’re serious about liking it or you’re just taking the piss, but seeing those three letters surrounded by whitespace reminds me of all the bad things in the world.

FTP is, as I’ve said, smelly hot garbage, and the infrastructure built to support FTP is even worse. Why? Well, one reason is that FTP has the most idiotic networking model conceivable. To see how crazy it is, let’s compare to a more sane protocol, like HTTP (for simplicity’s sake, I’ll do HTTP/1.1). First, you get the underlying transport protocol stuff and probably SSL. The HTTP client opens a connection from some local ephemeral port to the destination server on port 80/443/whatever and does all the normal protocol things (so syn->synack->ack and Client Hello -> Server Hello+server cert -> client kex+change cipher -> change cipher -> encrypted data). FTP does TCP too! Same same so far (minus SSL, unless you’re using FTPS). Next, the HTTP client goes like this:

GET /index.html HTTP/1.1
Host: www.whatever.the.fuck
# a bunch of other headers

and you know what fucking happens here? The fucking server responds with the data and a response code on the same goddamn TCP connection. You get a big, glorious response over the nice connection you established:

200 OK
# a bunch of headers and shit

HERE'S YOUR DAMN DATA NERD

So that’s nice, and the client you’re using to read this used that flow (or an evolution of that flow if you’re using HTTP/2 or HTTP/3). So what does FTP do? It does one of two really stupid things depending on whether you’re using active or passive mode. Active mode is the default for the protocol (although not the default for most clients), so let’s analyze that! First, your FTP client initiates a TCP connection to your server on port 21 (by default), and then the server just sends this:

<--- 220 Rebex FTP Server ready.

ok, that kinda came out of nowhere. You’re probably using a modern client that saves you from all of the godawful footguns, so it then asks the server what it supports:

---> FEAT
<--- 211-Supported extensions:
<---  AUTH TLS;SSL;
<---  CDUP
<---  CLNT
# A whole bunch of other 4 letter acronyms. If I was writing an FTP server, I'd make it swear at the user since there are a lot of fun 4 letter words

There’s some other bullshit we don’t care about right now, although highlights include sending the username and password in plain text. There’s also ASCII vs binary mode. WE’LL GET BACK TO THAT. :|

So then we want to do a LIST. You know what happens in active mode? Your computer opens up some random fucking TCP port. It then instructs the FTP server to CONNECT TO YOUR GODDAMN COMPUTER. Your computer is the server, and the other side is now the client. I would post a more detailed overview of the FTP commands, but most servers on the internet disable active mode because it’s a goddamn liability. All of the sudden, your computer has to be internet facing with open firewall ports, and that’s just a whole heap of shit.

I’m probably not blowing many minds right now because people know about this shit. I just want to mention that this is how FTP was built. The data plane and control plane are separate, and back in 19XX when this shit was invented, you could trust your fellows on ARPANET and NAT didn’t exist and sure HAM radio operators here’s the entire goddamn 44.0.0.0/8 block for you to do packet switched radio. A simple protocol for simple times, back before we knew what was good and what was bad.

So, active mode sucks! PASV is the future, and is the default on basically all modern clients and servers! Passive mode works exactly the same as the above, except when the client goes to LIST, the server opens some random TCP port (I’ve often seen something like 44000-44010) and tells the client, “hey you, connect to 1.2.3.4:44000 to get you your tasty data.” Sounds great, right? Well, there’s a problem that I actually touched on in my last paragraph. Back when this dogshit was first squeezed out in the 70s, everyone had a public address. There were SO MANY addresses! 4 billion addresses? We’ll never use all of those! That is clearly not the case anymore. We don’t have enough addresses, and now we have this wonderful thing called NAT.

Continued in part 2.

In that case, I’d like to chime in and add NFS to this list. The often overlooked jewel of the glorious past days. /j

Ever heard of IPFS? I really hope that will take off some time.

Was it really back in 2009 that both Google and Facebook used XMPP compatible chats? Those were the days.