I’ll start:
- RSS and blogs, news vs. social media
- XMPP vs. WhatsApp/FB messenger/Snapchat
- IRC vs. Matrix, Teams, Discord etc.
- Forums vs. Social media, Reddit, Lemmy(?)
Honestly, if the FOSS community wants better adoption of these technologies, there needs to be an stronger emphasis on presentation and UI/UX.
The general public isn’t interested in using something that looks janky, behaves glitchy, or requires fiddling with settings to get looking nice.
Say what you want about that, I’m not defending it. I think people should care more about content and privacy/freedom vs just shiny things, but that isn’t the world we live in right now.
The big tech corpos know this, companies like Apple have become worth trillions by taking existing tech and making it shiny, sexy, and seamless.
Maybe that is just antithetical to FOSS principles. I don’t know what is the correct approach. All I know is I’ve heard so many folks who are curious about trying out FOSS software give it up because they encounter confusing, ugly, buggy user experiences.
Some FOSS products have figured this out, Bitwarden, Proton Mail, and Brave Browser have super polished and clean UX and generally are as or more stable than their closed-source counterparts.
Sad truth. I’m super happy with my FOSS experience overall, but I’m also a techie and very open to tinkering with stuff.
OP, I like several of your examples though. Lots of the old school tech is really solid. Just needs a clean fast front end in many cases.
My choice is Vim and its variants. Add some plugins, it’s a really great way to write code. I have no interest in GUI IDEs anymore since getting my NeoVim installation set up and tuned.
Linux will never be main stream popular unless it becomes pre-loaded on major brand laptops and computers, however good the desktop enviroments and apps are. This is the thing that doesn’t get much talk, but however seemless and easy to install most modern Linux distros people just aren’t installing their OS’ in the first place. Most people either get their OS pre-installed or ask their local Geek Squad to do it for them.
There might be some traction if those laptops and desktops were a little cheaper than those preloaded with Windows.
One issue is that Microsoft makes so much on data collection, that they actually pay manufacturers to put Windows on there, it’s one of the methods used to try to keep stock computer prices low. While this is scummy and anticompetitive, it helps the consumer and gives me a chuckle that installing Windows inherently decreased the worth of a computer.
Sadly, oftentimes, Forums are replaced by discord, despite… how different those are.
And, discord is inferior in so many ways. Not only you can’t easily search for the content, you also need an account on centralized proprietary software, that also is quite resource heavy. Not to mention the privacy concerns.
It’s also very hard, if not impossible in some cases to find old conversations on discord, vs forums where they’re mostly preserved for eternity.
The Thunderbird desktop mail client is far better (feature-rich, stable, interoperable) than any webmail or phone app mail client I’ve ever seen.
Microsoft Outlook, from what I’ve seen of it, is horrible compared to Thunderbird. Why anyone would use the former is beyond me. You can’t even easily see message headers, so how the hell are you supposed to know whether a message is legit?
XMPP is very underappreciated.
Agree on RSS.
Don’t have enough experience with XMPP.
IRC is not a secure protocol, I think matrix takes the cake there. (although I really miss IRC)
Lemmy and Reddit do have an upvote feature and aggregation across different topics / communites, which I think it’s what old school forums lacked.
The real problem with IRC had always been that it didn’t really scale. It’s fine for a few hundred people, but eventually shit just breaks.
RSS was absolutely the shit
Do people not use it anymore? I still do. I follow a boatload of different youtube channels, webcomics, blogs, etc. If there’s some other way besides RSS to have all of those updates show up on a single page, I don’t know it.
That’s what I used twitter for tbh. Since everyone is on it it’s easy to follow people, get instant updates and maybe even discover something new through the people you follow and their likes. It’s really a shame it went to shit, it was the lurkers perfect tool, especially when it comes to artists or content creators.
Not everyone is on twitter, but lots (all?) of Content Management Systems and blogs have a RSS feed.
As an academic, I’m syndicated to several labs and research groups which have their own websites, but don’t care about being visible on Twitter.
do birds fly? do ducks duck?
uMatrix browser extension. It has been marked archived by Gorhill, last release is two years old, you are supposed to just use uBlock [Origin]. However, it still (luckily) works fine and is exactly what I want. (Sure, I won’t install this for my parents.) The GUI to simply choose what you want the site to be allowed to do is perfect.
Not much. That’s the thing about FOSS—it keeps getting better. It is not subject to enshittification like e.g. Windows is.
I too prefer forums over news aggravators with comment trees.
Can you elaborate?
I personally vastly prefer the comment tree style of conversation - I’ve been online since the bulletin board era, but I can’t find myself going back to it ever again. I find it infinitely easier to follow a conversation when all the responses are in one place.
The communal feeling is indeed missing in news aggregators, though I’m not sure whether it’s more about the style of conversation or just me getting older and not being willing to invest time in online communities as much.
I spent a fair portion of my youth on unthreaded forums and I kinda miss the way that discussion could ramble and sidebar conversations would spawn within posts and weave in and out of the main topic. With threaded/tree-format forums, individual conversations are easier to follow, but you get far enough down any one branch of a conversation and it’s just two people arguing without any moderating input from the rest of the group.
Thanks for reminding me of that! I haven’t been around since the old old forum days, but from my time on Minecraft server Enjin forums, I definitely remember arguments going on, outside of the main discussion, and every once in awhile you’d get a ‘settle down you two’ from someone. The tree format kind of takes the ‘one big room, many conversations going on’ vibe away.
openscad looks ancient and works awesomely
USENET. Replacements aren’t distributed, or make discussion group discovery difficult, or don’t have decent native desktop clients, or some combination of those.
You know any good guides about how to get started with Usenet?
Because clients can present very different interfaces, it’s difficult to point to a single guide, but the basic principles are simple enough: get a client, point it at a server ( https://www.eternal-september.org/ provides a free one if your ISP no longer has its own, but it doesn’t carry the alt.binaries subhierarchy), download the list of available groups, subscribe to a few, read, and enjoy.
As for which client, I use Pan, but that’s Linux-specific. For other OSs, I haven’t a clue. If you happen to use Thunderbird for email, I think it still has the necessary support.
Keep in mind, though: USENET died in part from lack of good moderation options, so all you can do about bad actors and spam floods is block messages from those posters from being visible in your client. Moderated groups did exist, but the system basically amounted to one person having to okay every single message posted, which meant there was a single point of failure. For instance, when the moderator of rec.arts.anime.info died unexpectedly, it became impossible for anyone to post to the group.
90% of the news hierarchy is a wasteland these days anyway—I use it mostly for monitoring some of the mailing lists from my Linux distro, which happen to have a USENET repeater. The only other area doing well is the binaries groups.
If you’re interested in running a server, start by making sure you have a good-sized data pipe—I’m not sure what the average size of a feed is now, but ten years ago it was measured in the tens of gigabytes per day (mostly binaries).
I can’t quite find the blog post but I saw someone do a blog post using AWS’ map reduce on multiple servers to process a dataset… and then they redid their pipeline using bash, awk, and maybe grep and a single 8-core machine did it 100 times or so faster.
Edit: found it https://adamdrake.com/command-line-tools-can-be-235x-faster-than-your-hadoop-cluster.html
Emacs vs. VS Code
Forums and Wikis vs. Discord
Yes I know, they shouldn’t serve the same purpose, but oftentimes nowadays
peoplecommunities use discord when they should use a forum or a wiki.vi, lynx, mutt, and of course X11 > wayland
though also controversially, I’ll take systemD over sysVinit
My distaste for systemd has been replaced by my distaste for netplan.
