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Comment by PicassoCTs | Hacker News Reader

It would be enough for each node, to know the whole contact graph, and have that stored in a open format?

Like a xml adressbook, that could be parsed by any software and could be created even with limited apis as provided by discord etc.

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It's not the network, though - it's the experience. When some community decides to up and move to libera, I connect and register with the new server and it's literally the same thing.

Clients create the UX and the community creates the content.

Now I imagine trying to get a community off discord to a different platform with slightly different interactions, slightly different "channel" styles, different reactions or role-setting, would be a much harder sell.

That being said, I have nothing against discord - I think they've made a really compelling product and have certainly set a bar for what a future open protocol should cover if it wants to be relevant

Good usecase for Solid (https://solidproject.org/).

It's also a good use case for a good old .vcard, which already has semantics for plenty of contact fields, so I wouldn't be surprised if there are some for IRC.

Modern phones have done their utmost to end these. If you even find the option to load a vcard they will (often sneakily) copy the contents to Google Contacts or similar, and you don't know if the phone is even keeping the vcard updated. It has made the approach feel unreliable.

I've switched to self-hosting my contacts with Radicale[0] (with "backups" to a git repo) synced via DavX5[1], with no problem of them mixing with Google Contacts. It's pretty annoying though that basically no current contacts app recognizes common fields like the nickname for a person.

[0]: https://radicale.org/

[1]: https://www.davx5.com/

I fully expected some blockchain nonsense opening your link, I'm pleasantly surprised.

It seems like an interesting project but I wonder if it has any chance of reaching critical mass. The incumbents have no incentives to interoperate with such a protocol as far as I can tell.

The same is true for any open protocol, at least at first. Any open protocol has to reach widespread usage first, and only then will incumbents have to adopt it. That's an extremely difficult task, but hopefully not impossible.

Is there a single example in recent memory of an open protocol achieving mainstream success without being sponsored by a large company?

I really wish something like this Solid protocol would succeed, but I don't see how you could generate enough momentum for it at the moment.

I'm not aware of any, no, and there's 0 incentive for any large company to sponsor one.

Which large company sponsors Bitcoin?

ActivityPub?

Matrix (before they landed their gov contracts etc)?

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