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0 pointschockchocschoir4y ago0 comments

> Sadly, open standards also slow down the development of new features, as everybody needs to be "on board" for new features to roll out. Take email (SMTP, IMAP, etc) as an example, where no major progress has been made in 25+ years, despite the platform being hopelessly insecure.

A more successful example of open standards would be the various standards that browsers use. Would you say that browser innovation has slowed down? The model adopted there is less "Wait for everyone to adopt this new standard we wrote" and more "If you have a feature you found many people are using, suggest it as a standard and we'll get all browsers to implement it".

This model could be replicated to messaging solutions as well, without slowing down any innovation as companies can add new features, as long as they get standardized over time.

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hackerfromthefu4y ago

Yeah sure, but messaging apps don't need new features - they need to simply send messages to each other. Walled gardens suck as a user experience for messaging apps.

spiffytech4y ago

> messaging apps don't need new features - they need to simply send messages to each other.

Messaging apps have evolved in very pro-user ways over the years. Reactions, threads, voice/video/screenshare, and more are all popular with users. Stuff that we didn't have at all in the AIM era, or maybe only had on one chat platform.

And under the hood, I read that an important reason everyone left XMPP is it fundamentally requires an active connection, but that means your phone's radio can never enter low power mode, hurting battery life.

I miss Pidgin. I really liked having all my chats in one place. I sort of have that now with Beeper.

But it's also clear that we're not done evolving the medium, and standardized protocols, for all their upsides, often crystalize a platform in whatever state it's in when the standard is written.

zaik4y ago

> but that means your phone's radio can never enter low power mode, hurting battery life.

This problem has been solved by https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0352.html

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dtech4y ago

> Would you say that browser innovation has slowed down?

For a long time it was, everyone was stuck on HTML4 while W3C was playing with XHTML. That only really changed when browser vendors came together and collectively decided to ignore start ignoring W3C and made WhatWG. Although IE6 was also a major factor here.

chockchocschoirOP4y ago

Entirely my point. It shifted from the flow of "Come up with standards > Software implements that" to "Software implements something > Standardize > Adjust software", the second flow works much better for innovation. Something we can do with chat apps too.

skywal_l4y ago

The Personal Computer is also a successful standard in my opinion. We see constant innovation but with interoperability. It's a little messy sometimes but keeps prices low and innovation high.

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