Which communication protocol or open standard in software do you wish was more common or used more?

Cyclohexane@lemmy.mlmod to Linux@lemmy.ml – 256 points –

Whether you're really passionate about RPC, MQTT, Matrix or wayland, tell us more about the protocols or open standards you have strong opinions on!

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WebSub (formerly PubSubHubbub). Should have been a proper replacement for RSS with push support instead of polling. Too bad the docs were awful and adopting it as an end user was so difficult that it never caught on.

I still want something push based (without paying for those rss as a service)

It's part of the RSS 2.0 standard. Of course it requires adoption by feed publishers.

rssCloud

Oh neat! I didn't know this existed. By any chance, do you know of any RSS readers that have implemented it?

No I'm sorry, I pull my feeds manually using a barebones reader. I'm guessing your best bet is one of the web-based readers as it would require a client with a TCP port that's reachable from the web. I have never seen a feed who provided the rssCloud feature though.

I wouldn't say that it never caught on. I run a feed reader and ~6% of feeds have WebSub. Most of these are probably wordpress.com blogs which include it by default.

YouTube also sort of supports it, but they don't really follow the standard so I don't think it counts.

But the nice thing about WebSub is that it is sort of an invisible upgrade to the existing feed (or any other HTTP URI) so it just works when blogs enable it.

Most major feed reader services support it. One problem is that you need a stable URL to receive the notifications. So it is hard to make work with client-side readers. But I don't think there is really a way around this other than holding a connection open to every feed you follow. So I would say that it does its job well. I don't really see a need to get to 100% adoption or whatever. If you have a simple static-site blog that updates every month or so I don't think it is a big deal that it doesn't support WebSub.