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Comment by forgotusername6 | Hacker News Reader

Tangential, but does anyone else think the world has lost its way in terms of standardisation and regulation of pretty much any communication mechanism after the telephone? I can dial a phone number for anywhere in the world from a phone made by anyone and it just works. I can't do the same for video or messaging or really even email.

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Yes, but for telephone networks the network is indistinguishable from the product. Now we’ve got the internet, which allows you to address an IP anywhere in the world whatever its ISP and above that we have services. I’d argue that its a better situation to be in, whatever the competitive issues that arise (eg, see the digital markets act).

This wasn’t true in the early (and in some countries even quite recent) history of the telephone. Having to use a phone provided by the phone company was the norm, which prevented the use of modems and forced early BBS and Internet users to use (much less efficient) acoustic couplers.

Worldwide direct dialing is also a relatively recent innovation in the history of the telephone.

Maybe we’re just in a similar phase of technological development?

I agree with this. At some point, around 2000-2005 or so, it seems internet pivoted from being protocol-driven to becoming service-driven. For example, I remember a protocol FOAF, "friend of a friend" that tried to build a social network using protocols amd contracts. It got nowhere. This must have been before Facebook was born. It is easy to compare in retrospect. Protocols are losing out.

LTT recently did a video on the last model of the XServe and one of the interesting points is that it's got a self-hosted XMPP/jabber chat server (and mail/exchange, VPN, time machine backup hosting, etc), and he pointed out that probably one of the reasons it died out was precisely this pivot from product/protocol focus to hosted services.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFnj7LvhvR4&t=760s

It is, after all, not like we really need slack or discord or whatever. Text chat is not complicated or resource intensive, people were hosting IRC in 1985 or whatever. Even persistent chat or web-accessible are really just minor features too in terms of resources, and you can forward some ports or set up a subdomain just like anything else.

So I mean, to put this ball back in your court: I'm sure you use discord, and I'm sure your employer uses slack. Why do you pay money for that and not just host matrix yourself? Matrix comes with all the free animated emojis you can upload, and a docker container costs you how much? And Algo/Tailscale show that setup can literally be as simple as providing AWS account creds and running a script.

Collectively we seem to have decided that these hosted services deliver value, even if that's simply a couple hours of an engineer's time to set up. None of us walk away from Omelas. Why is that?

Everyone (even here) kinda rolls their eyes at the BSky/Mastodon folks but the fact of the matter is those are the people walking away while we pay for discord and slack and google business.

I don't think this is really a problem. Communications have always been a messy thing over time, from language issues to reliability issues to incompatibilities and costs.

Regardless of what stands, it's pretty damn good at the moment. I have a pocket computer that talks to people all over the world. So I have two messaging apps on it? I'm not even bothered.

The thing is I don't actually really dial anyone with their phone number any more other than close family. Most of the time I will use whatsapp video calls because said other person is usually somewhere that roaming doesn't work and is tethered on a WiFi hotspot instead. Granted that uses name resolution via phone number but it doesn't need to.

I disagree. I’ve lost touch with numerous casual acquaintances over the years because they went to one app and I didn’t or vice versa. If there was a better effort at standardization it would have been easier to maintain these connections rather than lose touch because some people went to Facebook messenger while others went to WhatsApp, discord, snap, etc and the fragmentation made it a nightmare to keep up with everyone. SMS is the standby but a surprising amount of people hate using text messages or email despite being completely comfortable with asynchronous text communication on other platforms. It makes no sense to me because it is functionally the exact same and the people I have met who have this concern are definitely not worried about things like message encryption

Additionally nowadays it’s becoming more common to be ideologically against usage of platforms and it sucks to be locked out of communication because of that. I don’t use meta products because I think they’re a disgusting company but a lot of my older family members refuse to move from the platform. If there was an open standard that allowed for me to use a platform I was comfortable with that could interoperate with Facebook messenger I could live with that.

I'm in a similar situation. Would you be happy interacting with Meta-product users via a non-Meta-product if it involved your data being stored (e.g. in a "shadow profile") and used to target ads against you? I'm not sure I would, but it hasn't cropped up yet.

99% of people don't seem to care.

Granted that's a problem but really it shows everything is a matter of perspective.

I suppose that would be the inherent problem with such a thing. And twitter, google, etc are probably no better tbf

> because they went to one app and I didn’t or vice versa

Why not? It doesn't seem difficult to just download and register for a new app. There's only so many major ones.

That actually highlights the other issue of fragmentation: sometimes I would bother to download the app and register but then we’d fall out because I wouldn’t regularly check an app for 1 or 2 people. It’s notifications get lost in the sea of notifications

If I could just have one app that allows me to cross platform communicate that would eliminate this issue. And of course let it go both ways

Fair. The sea of notifications thing is a problem.

No. SMS, MMS, SIP, e-mail, even Jabber are universal standards.

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