Which communication protocol or open standard in software do you wish was more common or used more?

RSS. It's still around but slowly dying out. I feel like it only gets added to new websites because the programmers like it.

IPv6. Lack of IPv4 addresses it's a problem, specially in poorer countries. But still lots of servers and ISPs don't support it natively. And what is worse. Lots of sysadmins don't want to learn it.

Markdown. Its only in tech-spaces that its preferred, but it should be used everywhere. You can even write full books and academic papers in markdown (maybe with only a few extensions like latex / mathjax).

Instead, in a lot of fields, people are passing around variants of microsoft word documents with weird formatting and no standardization around headings, quotes, and comments.

Unified Push.

Unbelievable that we have to rely on Google and co for sth as essential as push messages! Even among the open source community, the adoption is surprisingly limited.

IPv6

I mean, why the hell is IPv4 still a thing??

• IPv6, needed for modern Internet not to collapse, would make many other important things easier. Easier to become an ISP, to selfhost, to build P2P networks, etc.
• GNU Taler, a payment protocol just look at it go: https://101010.pl/@didek/111934952208145427, or just imagine building a payment terminal of a Raspberry Pi
• Matrix, to unify chat, conference and calling apps
• some self-arranging darknet protocol becoming a norm like I2P, GNUNet or Yggdrasil, so we could have a backup when mass Internet blockage happen

Do Not Track

Such a simple solution for the cookie banner issue. But it prevented websites from tricking users into allowing them to gather their data, so it had to go.

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 :)

odf/odt/ods

.md

SimpleX

Matrix

OpenPGP

Last, certainly not least... ActivityPub

XMPP

IOT devices shouldn't connect to wifi. ZWave or zigbee is much better suited to IOT stuff, but it seems to mostly get adopted in very limited, locked down proprietary shit like Hue Lights.

LaTeX. As someone in academia, I absolutely love it. It has some issues like package incompatibility, but it's far far better than anything else I've used. It's basically ubiquitous in academia, and I wish it were the case everywhere else as well.

Matrix... it's on such a good path I can't complain. Adoption could be faster but it's alright.

I2p, although I have no idea if the lack of adoption has not a very good reason.

• Communication: Matrix
• Browsing: I2P
• Communities: ActivityPub / Mastodon
• Software Forge: Fogejo + ForgeFed
• OS: Linux
• Money: Monero

Since they meet at least one of,
if not all of the following:

• Decentralized / Federated
• Sensorship resistant
• Privacy respecting
• Open source

QUIC

I wish Microsoft Office would use the .odf standard by default. Or, failing that, it'd implement its own published .docx specification correctly, so other office suites can be compatible.

I2P. Current protocols should go through it

XMPP.

Remember SOAP? Remember XML-RPC? Remember CORBA?

Those were not very good.

peer to peer, i would be happier thitking that every time i open somo application, i'm helping it, like i2p

Others have said already, but XMPP and RSS. Also, nobody mentioned NNTP yet.

I wish everything was accessible by NNTP and we had better NNTP clients. NNTP is like RSS but for forums (so, Lemmy, Reddit, or anything where you could reply to posts). Download for offline reading, read in your client, define your own formatting, sorting, filtering, your client, your rules.

If Lemmy was accessible via NNTP, I could just download all posts and comments I'm interested in and reply to them without any connection, and my replies would get synced with the server later when I connect to WiFi or something.

https://editorconfig.org/

XMPP

RFC 2549 is such an important improvement over RFC 1149. Everyone should adopt the updated standard.

I wish people used email for chat more. SMTP is actually a pretty great protocol for real time communication. People think of it as this old slow protocol, but that’s mostly because the big email providers make it slow. Gmail, by default, waits ten seconds before it even tries to send your message to the recipient’s server. And even then, most of them do a ridiculous amount of processing on your messages that it usually takes several seconds from the time it receives a message to the time it shows up in your account.

There’s a project called Delta Chat that makes email look and act like a chat app. If you have a competent email service, I think it’s better than texting. It doesn’t stomp on the images you send like SMS and Facebook do, everyone has it unlike all the proprietary services, and you can run your own server for it that interacts with everyone else’s servers.

Unfortunately, Google, Microsoft, etc all block you if you try to run your own server “to protect against spam”. Really, I’m convinced that’s just anticompetitive behavior. The fewer players are allowed to enter the email market, the less competition Gmail and Outlook will have.

As much as I like ProtonMail too, unfortunately their encryption models prevents it from working with Delta Chat. I’d love to see Proton make a compatible chat app that works with their service.

I made an email service called Port87 that I’m working on making compatible with Delta chat too. I’d love to see people using email the way it was originally meant to be used, to talk to each other, without being controlled by big businesses.

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.

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

I'd love to see more adoption of... I2C!

Bazillions of motherboards and SBCs support I2C and many have the ability to use it via GPIO pins or even have connectors just for I2C devices (e.g. QWIIC). Yet there's very little in the way of things you can buy and plug in. It feels like such a waste!

There's all sorts of neat and useful things we could plug in and make use of if only there were software to use it. For example, cheap color sensors, nifty gesture sensors, time-of-flight sensors, light sensors, and more.

There's lmsensors which knows I2C and can magically understand zillions of temperature sensors and PWM things (e.g. fan control). We need something like that for all those cool devices and chips that speak I2C.

I sincerely wish all of my messages were delivered to me by an owl holding a scroll.

SimpleX. No federated messenger is good for privacy.

But I see how SimpleX is impossible for public groups, as spam is basically unavoidable.

OpenTelemetry everywhere please

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.

FTP

Seriously guys, let's share files the old fashioned way. Without bullshit.

Stream Control Transmission Protocol. It’s the Betamax of low level networking.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stream_Control_Transmission_Protocol

xmpp (jabber)

I used to have an open public SIP address that would ring a home phone, complete with a retro answering machine, but nobody uses SIP...

I wish my employer just accepted my push to use OAuth...

Idk I just wanna finger my server

finger cyclohexane@lemmy.ml

TOML

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.

Uds, shm, fuse for ipc. Ini for configs.

I've been playing with MQTT on meshtastic. I really hope LoRa and meshtastic continue to grow.

NBD (Network Block Device), it's like a remote hard drive.

I’m really into CloudEvents because I love event-driven systems, and since events can come from, or be consumed by, so many different services, having a robust spec is super duper useful.

I wish the protocol used by Hotline Client took off, it was basically Discord in the 90s with its support for announcement/news posts and file sharing

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.

OpenTelemetry and in particular I wish more protocols had Traceparent propagation support and more software had support for sending spans and traces to an OTLP endpoint to construct a full picture of everything that is going on in a distributed system.

RCS compatibility between iOS and Android operating systems

Many years ago I found Silc very interesting.

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SILC_(protocol)
• https://github.com/silc/silc/issues/9 Is silc dead? #9

There are a bunch of message broker services out there, and having a consistent set of common keys along with a documented process for transforming events to/from different systems means that this kind of data can move through different systems without getting mangled. It does have a spec for JSON, so it can be considered just a standardized JSON blob with transformation rules. But it also has a protobuf spec, specs for MQTT, NATS, HTTP, Avro, etc. It’s a common language for all these systems.

FHIR instead of all legacy standards. Also ISO IDMP to make referencing medicines way easier.

honestly: activity pub, matrix, xmpp, markdown and soo many more probably. All of these would be able to solve our walled gardens problem, but the apps with a basically monopoly don't have much of an incentivw to implement them

Dconf

definitely some alternative internet mesh routing standart, just imagine if every device with wifi or ethernet could just extend the network without relying on an isp, yeah they could still serve as a fast backbone, but they just wouldn't be needed and no disaster could really ever disrupt the whole internet again

Hashcash