In your opinion, which FOSS software is by many considered "old" or "obsolete", but are in fact, in your opinion, in many ways better than the newer alternatives?
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(?)
You are viewing a single comment
XMPP is very underappreciated.
Helpful Wikipedia link (for those like me who had no idea what XMPP was): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMPP
It so is. The only protocol that might beat it once it gets a desktop client is SimpleX
I’m glad you mentioned SimpleX. I think it’s a really cool and promising idea, yet hardly anyone knows about it :(
On paper it was great, but in practice no one implemented it fully and while I don't know why it is probably complicated.
Jabber was the way to go 10+ years ago but than everything stopped since no one managed to make clients for voice and video chat, than we just all dropped it.
I would call it big fail since it didn't manage to materialize in usable form.
On the other hand, it is never too late to make new better protocol based on xmmp for modern times.
xmpp has clients doing voice and video - it has for years. It is p2p and falls over in some nat to nat situations, which is where stun/turn come in on the server. Check out jmp.chat - they built a voip phone service using xmpp clients.
I know they exists, but never got to the usability point we need.m, or even if it did it was too late.
If a sizable chunk of the Reddit community can move to an alpha/beta grade link aggregator platform that can't handle the load because we believe in the decentralization or the instance's mission or the overall concept of federation, why is it too late for the community to re-adopt a mature messaging platform that mirrors those ambitions?
Because messaging of that sort needs contacts and Redditors (including me tbf) don't have friends.