Often times I wonder why basically _everything_ must be on the Web, and if all that historical baggage and complexity is really necessary, or even worth it at all.
Hell, just today I was trying to figure out how to use native emoji in Discord. Turns out, you can't, and they just force you to deal with those god-awful cartoony ones. Ugh. One day someone will come back around and reimplement basic text chat as a "minimal", "sleek", or "uncluttered" experience and we'll come full-circle. Maybe it'll even use XMPP this time....
Because for the great majority of users, i.e. those who thought that "the internet" lived inside the blue "e" icon for IE on Win XP, or those who "break their cup holders" [1] they have great difficulty handling the fact that they need to launch different apps on their computer for different purposes and so everything has coalesced around "web based" as the lowest common denominator in an attempt to accommodate everyone.
[1]https://www.ebaumsworld.com/jokes/computer-cup-holder-joke/8...
The decision to appify the web was an economic one made not on behalf of the end user, but corporations. It's cheaper to write a website or a webapp than a native application, to distribute bits than burn a CD or cartridge. It's cheaper to publish in bits than ink and paper. It's cheaper to handle electronic forms than physical, mailed in forms. It's cheaper to send an email than call someone on the telephone.
Because it seems wildly hyperbolic. We're not in the year 1995 anymore.
That's exactly what I was thinking. We're not in the 90s when people thought AOL and the internet were synonyms.
But if I had to think of a modern equivalent of this joke, I would say now they think that Wi-Fi and the internet are synonyms.
Sadly, I have no logs from the old days, so all I have is memories of lots of CTCP SOUND shenanigans.
functionally, Discord and Slack have commercialized that model, with clear and obvious effects for people that were using IRC. every community i was part of via IRC has migrated to those services, and i haven't encountered a new community on IRC in forever, but have encountered plenty of new Discord communities
Contrast with HTTP and other related web technologies, whose specifications are so complex that only the largest tech firms can even dream of building their own implementations, let alone achieving full standards compliance. Moreover, those standards are also often driven by those same corporate interests who own significant usage share in the browser space.
To the extent that corporate interests will advocate for standards in their own self-interest (recent example: Google WEI), I would say that the protocol has been commercialized.
Yes. That's why I was using the IRC bridge.
NAT. You can thank NAT for making the internet far worse.
Sounds like we're headed in the right direction... if you're in the business of selling shovels.