A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
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It’s because it isn’t a silo?
Discord, Slack and a bajillion similar apps do not meld with other apps. Email just happened to hit critical mass before “let’s try to get a monopoly” became the slogan of all tech, and collectively Big Tech is too stupid/hostile to replace it with some cooperative protocol.
iMessage is another pure example of this.
There are tons of open messaging protocols that have been replaced by closed ones. For instance, Discord shouldn't be a thing since IRC exists, but Discord exists and is very successful.
For some reason, likely tied to how it is used, email survived as an open protocol.
For instance, Discord shouldn't be a thing since IRC exists, but Discord exists and is very successful.
IRC lacks a massive amount of features that discord users typically want. Screensharing, VCs with group and camera support, built-in history (don't need to use a bouncer like on IRC), built-in online GIF searcher and sender with one click, huge community of bots that use discord's API to do anything from games to moderation.
It isn't even close.
ICQ and AIM managed to draw a huge crowd in the early (ish) days of home Internet.
It's not about features...it's about ease of use.
Also, IRC wasn't as decentralized as email to begin with, there were several isolated networks that would not communicate with each other (dalnet, EFnet, undernet, etc)
It's not about features...it's about ease of use.
Its absolutely about both features and ease of use. If your program doesn't do what people want from it, then good luck.
Its also irrelevant to talk about considering I have used IRC and highly doubt that people are going to consider it easier to use than discord.
Yeah I'm giving the ease-of-use points to Discord.
I'd agree that both are big, sure...but ICQ and AIM didn't have attachments or GIFs or screensharing, They barely had text formatting. Yet they were still bigger than the semi-decentralized (but at least standards-based) IRC. The features weren't the big lure, it was the ease of use.
Discord (to me) has better UX than any IRC I’ve ever experienced.
Email, on the other hand, is total baloney if it’s not interoperable. It’s why SMS/MMS is like a zombie that just won’t die, and telecoms are more cooperative than most of Big Tech.
E-mail barely hanging on between spam, broken HTML and an oligopoly of providers.
Yeah email is one thing I don't bother to run on my own server, because all the oligopoly providers mark unknown servers as spam by default, so you can't send emails to anyone anyway...
It's an ongoing debate in one of the projects I work with if we should move to a more forge oriented development process. For all it's faults email does provide a good record of discussion as well as evidence of review.
I've not heard of this before, and a search finds a lot about Minecraft?
Forge is a newish term for systems like github, gitlab, forgejo, gitea, etc that provide source control, project management, issues, and discussion features for projects.
And more to the point, Forge is a free, open-source server that allows players to install and run Minecraft mods. It was designed with the intent to simplify compatibility between community-created game mods for Minecraft: Java Edition.
It sounds like maybe OP and their crew were maintaining Minecraft compatibility via e-mail prior to the release of Forge.
Something could replace it easily if they tried to use the open standards and decentralized system like email has. But tech companies have gone too greedy, they won't make anything that works with other tech companies. Every one of them are trying to pull users to themselves. Now we have people with account in 5 different websites to communicate with different people instead.
It is sad how far the technology has come. It'd allow so much improvements in quality of life and yet it'll all being used to extract more money, making life shittier.
My most useful emails come from family and groups.io. Rarely some helpdesk response, though if it says reboot something, i stop talking to them.
I hope the Fediverse will prove similarly resilient.
It seems like a category error to compare email to Discord or Slack. The latter two are distinct companies and not protocols.
You're right in theory, but in practice the point is that email survives because it's not a closed, proprietary protocol.
Unfortunately I don't think the issue is quite so simple. We used to have open chat protocols that were slowly strangled by big tech until only their solutions remained.
I think the biggest problem is simply user apathy, if users cared more we wouldn't have the whole US green/blue bubble problem
Also Usenet. Still around after decades. As long as people are hosting news servers, it will stay. The original decentralized protocol.
Matrix, IRC, XMPP
Also Email is useful and you probably shouldn't waste your time consuming info from people who think otherwise.
xmpp is underrated
this is your reminder to set up OpenPGP. encrypt your email.
Yeah and I'll use it with maybe one other of my tech nerd friends
Delta Chat is basically works on PGP emails.
IMAP is useful. POP can crawl back to the bowels of hell from whence it came.
JMAP is apparently the shiny new thing trying to replace IMAP.
Neat! I just did a quick read about it. JSON over HTTP would offer a lot of new features, most notably not requiring a persistent connection in the transport layer like IMAP in TCP. I’ll keep my eye on it. Thanks for the heads up!
