It turns out it's very slow to evolve a protocol. How long did it take for IRCv3 to handle channels having persistent history? How about channel takeovers via network splits? We knew these were problems in the 20th century but it took a very long time to fix.
Oh, and the chathistory Extension is still a draft! So is channel-rename! And account-registration?
And why is it still so painful to use Mastodon?
That's but one of many examples. Consider how the consolidation of HTML and HTTP clients was the only way that we ended up with any innovation in those services. People have to keep up with Chrome who just does their own thing.
I want to want a decentralized world governed by protocols, but good software that iterates quickly remains the exception rather than the rule.
That is good to understand, but when that trade starts causing issues, it is important to remember that there was a trade made.
We aren't as stuck as we think we are, unless we decide not to reevaluate our past choices.
Matrix has shown how incredibly difficult it is to make a modern service in a decentralised way. Requirements like preventing spam become immensely difficult.
Do any fully trustable ID validation services exist? Ones that verifiably never store your ID but just a validity status for a given ID on a blockchain?
Assuming you don't want actual ID verification, the choices are even larger but with different trade-offs.
Imagine a messaging app for example, a 1 month old account with a Nigerian phone number cold DMs an account in Australia. The likelihood of this being spam/abuse is extremely high. Vs a 5 year old account that mostly messages mutual contacts cold DMing an account in their own country.
In many countries, phone numbers are a proxy for ID and are difficult to get without having a local ID. The countries which have not secured their phone number system will be less trusted by spam filters.
Oh, TLS also. Encrypted connections over HTTP are trivial.
Arguably this has created far more freedom by making encrypted network traffic default and free. Convenience is also freedom when it comes to accessibility.
It's pretty good today! Lots of things improved a lot! Some big clean ups!
But think of how much better it would be if people stayed woke, if they didn't just throw up their hands call defeat & say it was never going to work. If there wasn't such a bleak rot in our soul, if we could try to play slightly longer games, I think in the medium & long run it would be much much better for us all.
It feels so easy to spread sedition, to project these fatalisms that only big dumb lumbering central systems win. I'm so tired of this bleakness, this snap to convenience as the only perceived possible win. Let the prophecy self fulfill no more, let us arise from this torpor. A little Ubuntu would be ao good for us all. Ubuntu the old saying (that the distro was inspired by) goes: "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together"
Edit: actually thinking about it - at the bottom of much of it is identity. We need new identity solutions for the protocols.
I agree that the delivery protocol could be more efficient, but use of JSON is a tradeoff that provides good extensibility and easier parsing (many well seasoned libraries exist in almost every language).
also what specifically are you worried about these 100 billion chatgpts doing?
I'm answering to that cost being a problem regarding "what prevents 100 Billion ChatGPTs from using any protocol?" - the context I have in mind for the above being scammers, political manipulators, spam, and people like that using ChatGPT/LLMs to take advantage of various protocols for profit (and the 100 billion figure being a figure of speech meaning "very many").
Back in the late 2000s and early 2010s Google and Facebook supported XMPP, so you could login to Facebook Chat / Google Talk via Pidgin through an XMPP gateway (if if this was the default protocol or a bridge I'm not sure, its been years).
The biggest strength I see for XMPP is that because the web and even enterprise (think banking etc) uses XML too, everyone's optimized the ever living crud out of HTML so you could get some very high performance libraries to churn through all those stanzas, but also more importantly, its an extensible protocol. There's no reason it cannot have half of the things that exist on Discord, without disrupting the protocols OOTB design, because unlike IRC and other competing protocols, its extendable by design.
My favorite example - Arista network switches can be clients on an XMPP server. Control plane's have to be very slim. XMPP enables someone with a network operator to apply wide, symmetrical configurations across a network, without repetition. You can add the "core" switches to a group chat, and query them for information simultaneously.
Found an example article: https://jonw.mayhem.academy/arista-switch-wrangling-with-xmp...
You would never see Discord as a control plane management option, nor a Slack, Telegram or Signal option. But if all or a group supported XMPP, there would be a low resistance avenue for that (if someone really wanted it).
As it stands, we have product lock in due to each service having it's own system, with limits on interactivity. So I won't be cross-channel quoting outage causes directly from the switch in the company Slack any time soon.
It's an advantage, sure, but to me the serialisation format is the least interesting thing. Others are similarly optimized too. I think the extensibility and approach to standards is far more interesting than the fact it uses angle brackets instead of braces.
Back in the days, I had to write my own parser, existing xml parsers couldn't handle the case well.
Absolutely with you up to here, but...
> Particularly these days when you can have a coding agent write the parser boilerplate, etc. for you.
Absolutely not. Having seen the infinite different ways a naive implementation of XML goes wrong, arguably being one of the main causes of death for XHTML because browsers rightfully rejected bad XML, "Don't roll your own XML implementation" should be right up there with "Don't roll your own crypto".
I don't feel like it's going out on a limb to say that if someone needs to defer to a LLM to implement XML they're not qualified to determine if it's done it right and/or catch what it got enthusiastically wrong.
The only example I can think that messages are expressed as documents is Microsoft Teams. And it’s as much an example of what not to do as anything.
I'm very much sympathetic to the post's argument, but I think it should be acknowledged that this kind of claim has an implicit "(for now)" at the end.
The legal system doesn't have good mechanisms for dealing with problems that it hasn't needed to deal with yet, but if most people moved to encrypted & decentralized protocols for communication, it doesn't follow that laws couldn't be amended to give governments powers to legislate or police it at scale if deemed necessary by some sufficiently powerful group (an autocracy, a voting bloc, a national security service, etc)
So I guess the other implicit piece is that one hopes the technological change comes with cultural change to our political expectations - once people get used to privacy and autonomy, they resist efforts to erode those rights again.
Best of luck to everyone advocating for this! Really hoping to see a lot of thriving communities post-Discord in the coming years.
We also need decentralized identity so my identity can exist independently of service providers, but still be owned by me and not an impersonator.
They (like any other entity) can attest, but such attestation should hold as few of any special value as possible.
An unusual position, as historically governments have provided birth and death registries [0], passports, identity cards, etc, etc
[0]: or, earlier, in the West at least, the church
Email is still a protocol, and the thing that ATProto is doing causes as many problems as it purports to solve.
Mostly because "decentralized identity" is still "identity." And the safest way to do identity is to have it be destructable and remakable on the fly.
It might be the safest, but it defeats lot of the purpose of identity. There is a reason it is a hassle to change your email address... so many services are tied to that identity. You can change it, but you have to change every service that is relying on it as your identity, and you still have to own your old email so you can prove to the service that you are the same person.
I am not sure how you could ever avoid this problem? The purpose of an identity is to be able to tell that one request is made by the same person who made a previous request... persistence is a requirement.
Identity is always hard, and I strongly doubt there is any great way that makes it "easier" and still safe.
Aka, yes please kill passkeys, or at least be super upfront and informative.
"When you use passkeys, you are giving your keys to Apple or Google, and they cannot guarantee safety."
To go on a tangent - I think that more people having personal public key pairs (via crypto) than ever is actually a positive direction. Atprotocol is another big player in identity at the moment, just as long as "can't be evil" mechanisms are kept alive and have good UX.
Which for reputable TLDs is permanent, outside illegal activities.
LLMs are making software easier to write and releases are increasing. The app stores that were not seeing an uptick last year are now showing the uptick in releases. It is happening.
This means software will be more competitive and lower margin. This sounds like doom but it's actually great. Great for consumers. Great for indie devs that want to compete against big companies. Their margin is your opportunity.
Meanwhile, the kinds of early adopters that you're looking for are very conscious of enshitification and lock-in. So the best way to reach them and get talked about is through making software that the big VC-backed companies would never write.
The winners will be one-man companies who understand and respect their customer. Open protocols show your users respect and could be a great differentiator.
Yeah, I also love my data uploaded to public Firebase buckets.
Vibe coding is not the answer to every problem.
I wanted to code in a 'real' language like C. I didn't respect the web technologies. I do now.
It's disservice to yourself to not use the tools available to accomplish your goals. I know the anti-AI sentiment is hot and sometimes for good reason. But there's value here, too.
As for open protocols, there are really two paths. You follow an open protocol that is already out there. Or you can, if you already have some success in your niche, open your SaaS up to be communicated with which can be the start of an open protocol.
With my own software, I'm making it easy for a user's LLM to interact with my software while not providing the AI tool myself. Through a copy markdown button that instructs the LLM how.
This isn't quite an open protocol but has some of the properties of them. It allows people to build integrations ad-hoc without much work. It is on their terms, not mine.
Right now, this seems to be the most ergonomic and transparent way to get integration that allows the user to be in control. And, for my own consumer perspective, the way I hope things go.
Now is a terrific time to be the change you want to see in the world.
What about applications? federations, or better: relays, would put an end to censorship. Encryption would put an end to surveillance. Cryptographic signing would improve authentication and security at wide as there would be no stored passwords to leak.
Until then, "protocols not services" will remain a privilege for the technical elite.
The identity point in the discussion is spot on. The missing piece in most protocol-first architectures is a portable identity layer that doesn't just recreate the service dependency at a different level. DIDs and Verifiable Credentials are trying to solve this but adoption is glacial because there's no compelling consumer use case yet — it's all enterprise compliance stuff.
The XMPP vs Matrix debate is interesting but somewhat misses the point. Both protocols work. The reason Discord won isn't protocol superiority — it's that they solved the 'empty room' problem by piggy-backing on gaming communities that already had social graphs. Protocol design is necessary but not sufficient; you also need a migration path that doesn't require everyone to switch simultaneously.
Interoperability has always been paramount, but gets so easily forgotten.
None of this could happen with a protocol. You cannot require age
verification on IRC, XMPP, ActivityPub, Nostr, or Matrix, because there is no
single entity to compel. Each server operator makes their own decisions. A
government would need to individually pressure thousands of independent
operators across dozens of jurisdictions, which is a legislative and
enforcement impossibility. And even if one server complied, users would
simply move to another.
Since the spec includes identity, content (in multiple formats), and authenticity/integrity, this makes it superior to nearly all alternatives for offline use. Once you know someone’s key, you can verify that content comes from them, however you manage to obtain that content.
Use Workflows and Policies, not Agents.
Agents is what they called programs in the Matrix. They were not helpful. Trusting AI Agents is dumb. And Agents can go rogue.
Could workloads really be broken up and distributed like this among many peer machines?