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this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2024
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Technology
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*the web
The internet has so far been doing a much better job surviving as a proper decentralized system than the web.
Really? What's left of the Internet beyond the web?
How many people use Usenet today, rather than forums or social media on the web?
How many people use IRC, rather than Slack? (Either on the web or in a Chromium-backed desktop app)
How many people use an email client, rather than webmail?
Some non-HTTP(S) Internet stuff:
Email is transferred to its destination (where, sure it might be accessed through a Web UI) via SMTP. Even where things like Slack are used internally, email usage between organisations is still extensive, due to effectively being a federated lowest-common-denominator system that's not completely at the mercy of a single vendor.
VoIP, which increasingly underlies telephony/mobile networks, uses things like SIP, RTP and RTCP - even if, again, it might be accessed via a Web UI, it doesn't have to be, and there are dedicated clients.
SSH is widely used for remote system administration. SFTP, built on top of SSH, is used to transfer sensitive data, e.g. (in the US) medical records covered by HIPAA.
SNMP is used for network device management, sometimes doing so via the Internet.
Don't confuse certain end-user applications with the Internet more generally.
The original comment, was the claim that the internet is doing a lot better than the web.
In that context, the fact that literally every single one of those services is primarily accessed and managed through the web, makes that claim that the web hasn't succeeded look a little ridiculous.
Usenet, IRC, mailing lists. and TUI email clients are fading away because they have horrible UX (and UI in most cases). The internet used to be a nerdy space, but now it's for everybody: from your youngest to your oldest citizens, from the least technically adept to the most technically adept, and everyone in between. You can mourn the death of technologies and solutions written for another era if you wish, but that doesn't make you better nor right. It just makes you bitter (or salty if that's what the kids say nowadays).
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There never has been a better newsreader than pineapple news. That program alone was reason enough to boot up BeOS, fite me irl.
IRC? Graphical, in particular, hexchat. Also switch the font to proportional you're not editing text.
IRC has no built-in support for replies, media (audio, video, stickers, reactions, custom emoji, etc.), threads, and encryption. It's barebones text with a bunch of cryptic slash commands on top of it - everything else is done by the client.
And pineapple news' UI is from another era. It's like looking at papyrus when you have Gutenberg's print.
To each their own, but the amount of people willing to use such outdated tech is dwindling.
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And? It's a chat room, not a forum and emojis are a scourge upon the internet. And you're certainly more likely to get an answer than on stackoverflow...
It's BeOS' default tk, the point is the UX not lack of subpixel font rendering. Windows looked like this back in the days. And no I don't use it any more, haven't visited usenet in almost 20 years.
Just like not everything that's new is good, not everything that's old is good. There's a time and place for anything. The time and place for IRC is a museum IMO. You may disagree, but I disagree with you probably just as much that "emojis are a scourge upon the internet".
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There's better protocols like PSYC, XMPP also supports chat. Never took off, though, because IRC is fine as a protocol: It doesn't do much, Latin-1/UTF-8 hybrid is nuts, but it works well enough for what people want from it: A water cooler. Go visit libera.chat, it's exactly what it is. What we got instead is discord, proving that people don't care about tech but fancy marketing and, allow me to be an old man shouting at internet clouds for a second, zoomers still know it from minecraft. Also presumably you aren't "professional" if you don't require an email address, the young'uns learned that from popups on blogspam sites.
Alright alright 😂
Back in the day I used IRC but prefer Signal and Matrix now. I, also, use an email client.
I know I’m an outlier, but I prefer text mode IRC, then slack, and then all the other shit (telegram, signal, discord, teams, etc) fall way behind. “Everything is a walled-off app” is a horrible way to communicate. I get why these companies do it, and I also even understand the headache over maintaining useful open APIs, but honestly, they drop that ASAP because it doesn’t make them money.
I have yet to see a usenet post that was both written by a person and not incredibly batshit insane