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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PGP/GPG. I would like to see the web of trust take off. Also I love the aesthetic for anything that's been signed, and would like to see blog posts everywhere be nested by long blocks of random symbols.

PGP has a bunch of limits (and I'm saying that as a cryptography nerd). We've learned a lot of things since the 90's and the better solutions are specialized encryption protocols like MLS / Matrix (E2EE group messaging) and running all kinds of other protocols on top.

The portable identity part of PGP can be handled by something like DID documents which works more like Keybase used to do (depending on specific implementation) where your declare a list of supported protocols with public keys and accounts under your control, so people can still achieve the same effect of using a strong cryptographic identifier to communicate with you, but with forward secrecy supported by default and much lower risk of stuff like sidechannel attacks.

key signing and web of trust is pretty cool but i'm somewhat opposed to it on a fundamental level. Let me decentralize my shit and mind my own business if you feel what i mean.

Anything that's relatively centralized identity wise is not something i'm a huge fan of right off the hop.

Let me decentralize my shit...

Isn't that why it's a web of trust, and not a center of trust? I think you might be confusing that with public key infrastructure.

Also, you can't decentralize your shit without a second party. That's kind of the point.

Isn’t that why it’s a web of trust, and not a center of trust?

yes, but it's still a trust, i don't consider that to be fully decentralized. It serves a purpose don't get me wrong, but i won't be signing my online profiles using WoT keys anytime soon.

The web makes it decentralized, which is accurate, though i tend to use decentralize way more aggressively on a level local to me. I suppose it's probably more dis-integrated, than anything. But whatever.