i wish all the big players would agree on one of the many open chat and IM protocols. it’s like kindergarten where the toddlers don’t want to share toys
RSS (RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) It is in use a fair amount, but it is usually buried. Many people don’t know it exists and because of that I am afraid it will one day go away.
I find it a great simple way to stay up to date across multiple web sites the way I want to (on my terms, not theirs) By the way, it works on Lemmy to :)
Honestly there is rarely a blog I want to follow that doesn’t have it. I do think it would be great to have more readers using it so that it becomes more significant, but for my reading it is actually pretty great.
Theres quite a few sites that still use it and existing ones in the Fediverse have it built in (which is really cool). But your right, the general public have no concept of having something download and queue up on a service rather than just going to the site. And the RSS clients are all over the place with quality…
WebSub (formerly PubSubHubbub). Should have been a proper replacement for RSS with push support instead of polling. Too bad the docs were awful and adopting it as an end user was so difficult that it never caught on.
No I’m sorry, I pull my feeds manually using a barebones reader. I’m guessing your best bet is one of the web-based readers as it would require a client with a TCP port that’s reachable from the web. I have never seen a feed who provided the rssCloud feature though.
I wouldn’t say that it never caught on. I run a feed reader and ~6% of feeds have WebSub. Most of these are probably wordpress.com blogs which include it by default.
YouTube also sort of supports it, but they don’t really follow the standard so I don’t think it counts.
But the nice thing about WebSub is that it is sort of an invisible upgrade to the existing feed (or any other HTTP URI) so it just works when blogs enable it.
Most major feed reader services support it. One problem is that you need a stable URL to receive the notifications. So it is hard to make work with client-side readers. But I don’t think there is really a way around this other than holding a connection open to every feed you follow. So I would say that it does its job well. I don’t really see a need to get to 100% adoption or whatever. If you have a simple static-site blog that updates every month or so I don’t think it is a big deal that it doesn’t support WebSub.
matrix, or at least interop standards for online communications. It’s such bullshit that you make a shitty chat app, and just because it’s free and relatively featured, become the single existing monopoly of chat applications.
Like idgaf as long as i can host a bridge between discord and matrix or some shit, and you technically can, but it’s a right pain in the ass to do so.
IPFS I’m really glad things like nerdctl and guix support it, but I wish more things too advantage of the p2p filesystem.
Petals.Dev and hivemind ml P2P AI inference and training seem like the only true viable options to make foundational models that are owned soley by authoritarian government s and megacorps.
Matrix for federated general real time communication. (Not justs chat, video, images, but just data, with third room being on the cooler demos for what is possible)
Activity Pub for asynchronous communication between servers. The socialmedia aspect is obviously the focus and the most mature, but I’m also excited for things like Forgejo (Codeberg.org) and Gitlab’s support.
I am also excited for QUIC for increased privacy of metadata and reduction of network trips.
The problem with IPFS is that kubo sucks. I used it for a while and it is always burning CPU doing nothing, failing to publish anything to the DHT and fetching files is slow. GC collects files that are supposed to be “pinned” by existing in MFS and so many other bugs all of the time.
I would love to see a new server take off that was built with quality in mind.
I think the core protocol is pretty good (although I think they should have baked in encryption) but even the mid-level protocols like UnixFS and DAG whatever are mired in constant change for no real reason as the developers jump on new fads.
Slow and requires additional tooling to run normally. Just not a lot of development on the core pieces tbh. Wasm support for example could make deployments way simpler (implement an ipfs proxy in any browser or server that supports wasm) but the ticket for that kind of died off. There is a typescript implementation, helia, that I haven’t checked out yet.
We are honestly kind of in a decentralization winter again, with ActivityPub being one of the few survivors gaining traction from what it seems. OpenSource luckily doesn’t just up and die like that, so I still have hope for some next spring.
PGP/GPG. I would like to see the web of trust take off. Also I love the aesthetic for anything that’s been signed, and would like to see blog posts everywhere be nested by long blocks of random symbols.
key signing and web of trust is pretty cool but i’m somewhat opposed to it on a fundamental level. Let me decentralize my shit and mind my own business if you feel what i mean.
Anything that’s relatively centralized identity wise is not something i’m a huge fan of right off the hop.
Isn’t that why it’s a web of trust, and not a center of trust?
yes, but it’s still a trust, i don’t consider that to be fully decentralized. It serves a purpose don’t get me wrong, but i won’t be signing my online profiles using WoT keys anytime soon.
The web makes it decentralized, which is accurate, though i tend to use decentralize way more aggressively on a level local to me. I suppose it’s probably more dis-integrated, than anything. But whatever.
PGP has a bunch of limits (and I’m saying that as a cryptography nerd). We’ve learned a lot of things since the 90’s and the better solutions are specialized encryption protocols like MLS / Matrix (E2EE group messaging) and running all kinds of other protocols on top.
The portable identity part of PGP can be handled by something like DID documents which works more like Keybase used to do (depending on specific implementation) where your declare a list of supported protocols with public keys and accounts under your control, so people can still achieve the same effect of using a strong cryptographic identifier to communicate with you, but with forward secrecy supported by default and much lower risk of stuff like sidechannel attacks.
I'd like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as FTP is, in fact, smelly hot garbage.
For context, I wrote this while waiting for a migraine to pass. I was angry at my brain for ruining my morning, and I like to shit on FTP. It's fun to be hyperbolic. I don't intend for this to be an attack on you, I was just bored and decided to write this ridiculous rant to pass the time.
I must once again rant about FTP. I've no idea if you're serious about liking it or you're just taking the piss, but seeing those three letters surrounded by whitespace reminds me of all the bad things in the world.
FTP is, as I've said, smelly hot garbage, and the infrastructure built to support FTP is even worse. Why? Well, one reason is that FTP has the most idiotic networking model conceivable. To see how crazy it is, let's compare to a more sane protocol, like HTTP (for simplicity's sake, I'll do HTTP/1.1). First, you get the underlying transport protocol stuff and probably SSL. The HTTP client opens a connection from some local ephemeral port to the destination server on port 80/443/whatever and does all the normal protocol things (so syn->synack->ack and Client Hello -> Server Hello+server cert -> client kex+change cipher -> change cipher -> encrypted data). FTP does TCP too! Same same so far (minus SSL, unless you're using FTPS). Next, the HTTP client goes like this:
GET /index.html HTTP/1.1
Host: www.whatever.the.fuck
# a bunch of other headers
and you know what fucking happens here? The fucking server responds with the data and a response code on the same goddamn TCP connection. You get a big, glorious response over the nice connection you established:
200 OK
# a bunch of headers and shit
HERE'S YOUR DAMN DATA NERD
So that's nice, and the client you're using to read this used that flow (or an evolution of that flow if you're using HTTP/2 or HTTP/3). So what does FTP do? It does one of two really stupid things depending on whether you're using active or passive mode. Active mode is the default for the protocol (although not the default for most clients), so let's analyze that! First, your FTP client initiates a TCP connection to your server on port 21 (by default), and then the server just sends this:
<--- 220 Rebex FTP Server ready.
ok, that kinda came out of nowhere. You're probably using a modern client that saves you from all of the godawful footguns, so it then asks the server what it supports:
---> FEAT
<--- 211-Supported extensions:
<--- AUTH TLS;SSL;
<--- CDUP
<--- CLNT
# A whole bunch of other 4 letter acronyms. If I was writing an FTP server, I'd make it swear at the user since there are a lot of fun 4 letter words
There's some other bullshit we don't care about right now, although highlights include sending the username and password in plain text. There's also ASCII vs binary mode. WE'LL GET BACK TO THAT. :|
So then we want to do a LIST. You know what happens in active mode? Your computer opens up some random fucking TCP port. It then instructs the FTP server to CONNECT TO YOUR GODDAMN COMPUTER. Your computer is the server, and the other side is now the client. I would post a more detailed overview of the FTP commands, but most servers on the internet disable active mode because it's a goddamn liability. All of the sudden, your computer has to be internet facing with open firewall ports, and that's just a whole heap of shit.
I'm probably not blowing many minds right now because people know about this shit. I just want to mention that this is how FTP was built. The data plane and control plane are separate, and back in 19XX when this shit was invented, you could trust your fellows on ARPANET and NAT didn't exist and sure HAM radio operators here's the entire goddamn 44.0.0.0/8 block for you to do packet switched radio. A simple protocol for simple times, back before we knew what was good and what was bad.
So, active mode sucks! PASV is the future, and is the default on basically all modern clients and servers! Passive mode works exactly the same as the above, except when the client goes to LIST, the server opens some random TCP port (I've often seen something like 44000-44010) and tells the client, "hey you, connect to 1.2.3.4:44000 to get you your tasty data." Sounds great, right? Well, there's a problem that I actually touched on in my last paragraph. Back when this dogshit was first squeezed out in the 70s, everyone had a public address. There were SO MANY addresses! 4 billion addresses? We'll never use all of those! That is clearly not the case anymore. We don't have enough addresses, and now we have this wonderful thing called NAT.
NAT, much like the city of Phoenix, is a monument to man's arrogance. Fuck NAT and fuck FTP. If your FTP server is listening directly on a public IP address hooked up directly to a proper router, then none of this applies. If you're anything like me, the last company I worked for (a small startup), or my current company (many many thousands of employees making software you know and may or may not hate, making many billions of dollars a year), then the majority of your servers are living in RFC1918 space. Traffic from the internet is making it to them via NAT (or NAT with extra steps, i.e. L4 load balancers).
A request comes in for $PUBLIC_IP TCP port 21 and is forwarded to your failure of a boxen at 10.0.54.187. Your FTP server is a big stupid idiot and doesn't know this. It thinks that it's king shit and has its own public IP address. Therefore, when it's deciding what ADDR:PORT it's going to tell the stupid FTP client to connect to, it just looks at one of the adapters on the box and says "oh, I'll tell this client on the internet to connect to 10.0.54.187:44007" and then I fucking cry. The FTP client is an idiot, but the IP stack on the client's home/business router is not and says "oh, that's an address living in RFC1918 space, I shouldn't send that out over the internet" and they don't get the results of their LIST.
So, how do you fix this? Well, you fix it by not using FTP. Use SFTP USE SFTP USE SFTP FOR GOD'S SAKE. But since this world is a shit fucking place, you have two options. The best option is to configure your FTP server to lie about its IP address. Rather than being honest about what a fool it is, you can tell it to send your public IP address to the client rather than the network adapter IP address. Does your public IP address change? Fuck you, you get to write a daemon that checks for that shit, rewrites your FTP server config, and HUPs the bastard (or SIGTERMs it if your server sucks and can't do a live config reload).
Let's say that you don't want to do that. Let's say you work at a small company with a small business internet plan that gives you static IPs but a shitty modem. Let's say that you don't know what FTP is or how it works and your boss told you to get it set up ASAP and it's not working (because the client over in Bendoverville Arkansas is being told to connect to a 10.x.x.x address) and it surely must be your ISP's fault. So you call up Comcast Business/AT&T/Verizon/Whoeverthefuck and you complain at their technicians for hours and hours, and eventually you get connected to a human that knows what the problem is and tells you how to configure your stupid FTP server to lie like a little sinner. The big telco megacorps don't like that. They don't want to waste all those hours, and they don't want to hire too many people who can figure that shit out because it's expensive. You wanna know what those fucking asshole companies did?
PART 3.
They made their STUPID MODEMS FUCK WITH THE FTP PACKETS. I have personally experienced this with Comcast Business. The stupid piece of shit DOCSIS modem they provide intercepts the FTP packet from your server saying "oh, connect to this address: x.x.x.x:44010" and they rewrite the fucking address to the public IP. There is no way to turn just this horse piss off. Now, for average business customers, this probably saved Comcast a bunch of money in support calls. However, if you're using the so-called bridge mode on that degenerate piece of shit-wrapped-silicon (where rather than allowing the modem to give you a DHCP address, you just configure your system to have one of the addresses in the /29 space and the modem detects that and says oh okay don't NAT traffic when it's going to this address, just rewrite the MAC and shunt it over the right interface), then something funny happens. The modem still rewrites the contents of the packet, but it uses the wrong fucking IP address! Because the public IP that your server is running on is no longer available to the modem, the modem just chooses another fucking address. Then, the client tries to connect to 1.2.3.5 instead of 1.2.3.4 where your server is listening, the modem says "hey I'm 1.2.3.5 and you can fuck off, I'm dropping your SYN for port 44010", and I get an angry call from the client asking why they can't download their files using this worthless protocol. I remember having a conversation like this:
Me: "Just use SFTP on port 22!"
Client: "No! FTP is faster/more secure/good enough for my grandfather good enough for me/corporate won't allow port 22."
Me: "Comcast is fucking me right now. What if we lied and served SFTP over port 21?" # we try it
Client: "It's not working! I can't even connect!"
I couldn't connect either. I couldn't connect to anything. Trying to do SFTP over port 21 caused the stupid fucking modem to CRASH.
Are you starting to see what the problem is? It's like Microsoft preserving bugs in Windows APIs so that shitty software doesn't break, and then they end up doing crazy gymnastics to accomodate old shit like the Windows 8 -> Windows 10 thing where they couldn't use "Windows 9" because that would confuse software into thinking it was running "Windows 95" or "Windows 98". FTP has some bugfuck crazy design decisions that we've collectively decided to just "work around," and it leads to fucking gymnastics.
Speaking of bugfuck crazy design decisions, FTP's default file transfer mode intentionally mangles data!
You expect a file transfer program to reliably and faithfully transfer your files, byte-for-byte, from one system to another. FTP spits in your face and shits on your chest. You know how Linux uses LF (i.e. \n) for newlines and Windows uses CRLF (i.e. \r\n) for newlines? Pretty annoying, right? Well, FTP's ASCII mode will automatically rip off those \r characters for you! Sounds pretty sweet, right? Fuck no it's not. All of the sudden, your file checksums have changed. If you pass the same file back to a Windows user with a different and more sane file transfer system, then they get a broken file because FTP didn't mind its own fucking business. If you have a CRLF file and need an LF file, just explicitly use dos2unix. Wanna go the other way? unix2dos. The tool has been around since 1989 and it's great.
Now, what if you're not transferring text, but instead are transferring a picture of a cute cat? What if your binary data happens to have 0x0D0x0A somewhere in it? Well, ASCII mode will happily translate that to 0x0A and fucking ruin your adorable cat picture that you were going to share with your depressed significant other in an attempt to cheer them up. Now the ruined JPEG will remind them of the futility of their situation and they'll slide even deeper into cold emptiness. Thanks, FTP.
You can tell your client to use binary mode and this problem goes away! In fact, modern clients do this automatically so your SO gets to see the adorable fuzzy cat picture. But let's just stop and think about this. Why use a protocol that is dangerous by default? Why use a protocol that supports no form of security (unless you're using fucking godawful FTPS or FTP over SSH)? Why use a protocol that is so broken by design that small business hardware has been designed to try to unfuck it? Is it faster? I mean, not really. SFTP has encryption/decryption overhead, but your CPU is so fast that you'd need to transfer at 25+ Gb/s to notice it. Is it easier? Fuck no it's not easier, look at all of the stupid footguns I've just mentioned. Is it simpler? The line protocol is simple, but so is HTTP, and HTTP has a much simpler control flow path (merging the data and control planes is objectively the right thing to do in this context). And shit, you want a simple protocol for cases where you don't have a lot of CPU power? Use fucking TFTP. It's dogshit, but it was intentionally designed to be dogshit so that a fucking potato could receive data with it.
There is no task that is currently being done with FTP that couldn't be done more easily, more securely, and more quickly with some other protocol (like fucking SSH and SFTP, which is now built into fucking Windows for god's sake). Fuck FTP.
I read the first two and kinda gave up my dude. Here’s my deal. I get that it’s bad under the hood. What else can I use that lets me and a friend pretend we just have folders in each other’s computers with just a port forward, IP, and a password?
That’s not even the type of setup you should use. Use a VPN of the type designed for games and IoT stuff, like ZeroTier, n2n, and more. Then you set up a local file share using something like Samba, only accessible by the people who can connect to your local network via the VPN.
The public facing VPN code will be MUCH more hardened against attack than your typical sharing tool with port forwarding.
ZeroTier is pretty easy to set up, but at the point where you're worrying about "barriers to sharing" you should probably using a cloud service anyway.
Ahhh but that’s the thing. A middleman being necessary is very against my values. I don’t want there being someone else or there limiting or telling me no. I’m not letting someone else’s DMCA compliance tell me what I can have. I’m also not really interested in non FLOSS.
You should be able to just use ssh/sftp. There are lots of great clients, and you can absolutely still use usernames and passwords, no public/private key stuff required. You can even use ssh and scp right from powershell on Windows boxen if you're so inclined. There's winscp, and if you want filesystem mounting, there's this: https://github.com/winfsp/sshfs-win
For macos and Linux, the options are far more plentiful.
Edit: there's also file pizza, which is a file transfer thingy with no middle man that's open source, although it's not copyleft AFAICT: https://github.com/kern/filepizza
and similar tools. Not really what you're after, I just think it's neat.
There are definitely a lot of good options out there. What are you using right now for regular old FTP? The odds are actually pretty good that it already supports SFTP. A lot of file management applications do both and lump them together, even though they're completely different protocols (sftp is from the late nineties).
If it doesn't, then I don't know what OS you're using, so I'll just recommend options for the big 3. For Windows, there's WinSCP. For MacOS there's Cyberduck. Most file managers on Linux distros let you just type sftp://me@wherever in the navigation bar, meaning you get a totally seamless experience with the rest of your FS.
EDIT: or, you can use sshfs-win on Windows and have your remote filesystem show up as a regular ol' drive, just like SMB. MacOS and Linux have sshfs, and I know there are GUIs wrapping sshfs on those platforms. I personally use sshfs at home and it's great (although no GUI wrapper, I'm a weirdo who doesn't use a graphical file manager at all).
:( I'm sorry to hear that. Well, for Android there's MaterialFiles, which is fully FLOSS and supports FTP, SFTP, and SMB. Not sure about iOS, but I imagine there are options there.
I hope that your journey through life becomes a little less rocky.
ZeroTier can be a fully self hosted VPN. You set up a server locally, port forward only the VPN service, and then everything else you run is accessible through it for the people you give access to.
So like… If I had a game installed on your computer, my computer could treat that game as if it’s local and load files over the Internet like it’s just reading my disk?
TeX. I was able to use it during school for some beautiful type setting and formatting but nobody I work with wants to use anything other than plain text or unfortunately more commonly binary wysiwyg editor formats. It’s frustrating and ugly.
WYSIWYG document editors are terrible at getting things exactly as you want.
If you’re a perfectionist, especially in presentation, it’s probably easier to adopt TeX than it is to get (Open)Office to do exactly what you want into.
What WYSIWYG binary formats have you been using? OpenDocument is zipped XML. OOXML is also zipped XML. RTF is plain text. Everything else is dead. RTF is too, actually.
Honestly, IRC was a very functional, easy, free, low-resource and privacy friendly chat protocol and I don’t really see why it got left behind. If you wanted image/ file support that could really be implemented client and/or server side.
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