I wish Discord was affected by the DMA so we could get some kind of official interoperability.
i think you're romanticising things.
the whole situation with interoperability was not sustainable, as evidenced by the fact that it was dropped by every player as soon as possible.
one of the reasons why it was not sustainable was that the standards at that time were conceived for a different era, and everyone wanted special features not available in the standards.
it does seem like we're having much better success with interoperability nowadays, but only because the standards are much better today.
No one moved away from email.
yes.
> What if they only use the old platform once a week? What if they only use the new platform once a week, but that's when an important discussion happens?
you’re describing low usage.
Nobody left email, yet the network effect is still very present in that space.
See how google closed hangouts to being able to communicate with other XMPP servers, or how slack dropped IRC and XMPP when they felt they had enough adoption to be able to do that.
So in the beginning you want interoperability so it's "just the same", then you drop it so the users are stuck.
i understand what you're writing and i agree. but in my case all our enterprise clients were demanding features that had us circumventing interoperability since the features they were asking for would never make it into the standards.
I don't think I am. As a user, I could use Pidgin or Gaim and talk to my friends across every service I used. This only stopped when companies started consciously working against these efforts. Discord explicitly and openly banned third party clients. They didn't have to do so. It has nothing to do with standards and everything to do with companies becoming aggressively and openly hostile towards anything that isn't directly under their control.
we tried to do it differently. it was impossible. every company had it’s own extensions on top of the standards because the standards were poor. those extensions only worked when chatting with someone on the same network using the same software. this was not sustainable. when we removed those standards we not only provided an incredible experience for the user but we also removed huge amounts of code that made everything much faster.
the casualty was interoperability.
Not because of open-standards - but because that was when IM protocols were straightforward to reverse-engineer and interop with, and this was before mass-adoption of SSL/TLS (let alone certificate-pinning).
2) Apparently we need regulation to make companies do it today, and that will force these companies to allow interoperability.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8861360 (one of the indexes of the issue)
This is what the internet used to be like. Nowadays, something like this would be unthinkable. But you could use Pidgin to connect to Facebook Messenger, AIM, ICQ and MSN. No, you couldn't necessarily use your AIM account to talk to somebody on FB, but that was only because the companies making these services didn't implement this. The fact is, it could've been done if they wanted. The technology was there, the environment was there, the open standard that almost everybody was using was there.
https://superuser.com/questions/717272/is-it-possible-to-tal...
Now you have Discord, Facebook, etc. banning third party clients and enforcing a walled garden when they don't have to. It's a conscious choice they're making.
I'm not sure why you're defending the current state of things. It's worse now.
If a product could conceivably do X and steps were taken in R&D to keep it from doing X (not that it wasn't implemented, but was specifically designed to prevent owners from doing X even though otherwise it could if steps weren't taken), or if the product maker does not publish protocols, formats, standards, etc, or designs those with the intent to thwart interoperability; or if the owner is prevented from changing programming code on a universal machine regardless of the product's function (phone, PC, microwave, washer, blood sugar monitor, automobile) with well-known interface hardware and communication protocols; or anything else in this spirit I have missed, will be in violation of Apple Laws and must have a 100% final point of sale sales tax levied so that philosophically highly anti-Stallman products can't compete easily against near-Stallman compliant products.
Closed source proprietary software and hardware are huge national security problems. Even if USGOV can sign an NDA to inspect source code and chip design, it's still a national security issue that you and I can't. It is a national security issue when decade-old idiot-TVs and idiot-cameras long out of software updates pwn computers and/or get turned into remote surveillance devices for digital voyeurs paying top dollar to collect private feeds into peoples' lives (don't ask).
Phew! I hate mobile keyboards!
Then again how many salaries would my schizo-presented ideas impact (many), and what is their intersection here (at least moderate)?
Probably the former, the latter would mark me as paranoid schizophrenic. :^)
If discord cant compete with email because its too hard to comply with open standards, maybe that particular rent seeking chat app wasn't actually all that innovative
For example, I don't need a spam filter on my discord. My signal is actually encrypted reasonably and provides reliably secure communication. I can send things like gifs and emoji in-line in a reliable, cross-platform way. Group communication isn't cursed, "top- or bottom- posting" isn't a thing people discuss.
Requiring people to build only on widely accepted standards prevents any kind of innovation in features, because before you can ratify anything, you have to get it approved by everyone else, which means that you're now in a land of super-ultra-waterfall design-by-committee that gives everyone the least-common-denominator communication features. That isn't good.