We talk about how protocols are less repressive than platforms, but things like RSS, IRC, and ICS feel out of place in the internet today. I'd like to be able to subscribe to may favourite microbloggers and artists on sites like twitter via RSS, but tech companies insist that I opt into their shitty platforms to access their user's posts. The difference in effort between making a Discord account and choosing an IRC client seems to have been enough to kill the latter for most communities. In this state of affairs, what steps can be taken to make these protocols feel like a real option again for everyone?

RSS is opaque as a new user. What the hell does someone who knows absolutely nothing use to subscribe to an RSS feed? You used to just use Firefox (the fact that Chrome dumps into an unformatted XML page remains the most appalling thing), but they dropped that because... because why? The fact that it isn't a built-in in browsers is easily the biggest reason for the low uptake, rather than corporate disinterest.

also, IRC had some big issues for usability that I hated even back when I first got on in like 2007 or so (nickserv/chanserv not being standard protocol level features remains obscene, and doing file transfers with xdcc was like pulling teeth), although it was pretty easy with getting what client to use (I think everyone just said use XChat, and later HexChat)
discord really was too convenient vs IRC unfortunately

A lot of it really is that these protocols either aren't that good or have extremely poor support on the software side
If you're pushing a protocol and don't have a decent reference implementation, no one is gonna pick it up. I saw something neat called hAtom to add syndication information to a webpage so you could subscribe to a page directly (eg, you'd be able to set up the index page with blog entries to be machine readable), but I don't know what supports it (if anything), lol.

>>2
It's all so depressing...

Opera at least still has rss built in.
But the stand alone rss client landscape is terrible. I don’t need a million weird features or a daemon constantly running. Check when I push check, store a list of feeds and let me group them and that’s literally all I need.

The thing about rss (and atom) is it sucks but it's the standard. The fact that it's already widely used and implemented is the main reason it's good.

IRC on the other hand just sucks, not only does no one use it any more but it's also unencrypted. You should probably be using xmpp or matrix rather than irc.

But let's not let this get us down, I think everyone can agree that bittorrent is a good protocol for example. Finger is kind of a fun one.

Then the obvious, gopher and gemini, although I feel like that's it's own can of worms that maybe needs a separate thread.

The difference in effort between making a Discord account and choosing an IRC client seems to have been enough to kill the latter for most communities.

To use IRC I simply get hexchat and join servers I like with a throwaway account
To use Discord I have to give them an email, verify it and then they lock me out of my account and demand a phone number from me.

>>5

but it's also unencrypted

IRC over TLS is really common these days (as in, the last 14 years or so).

Is there any twtxt to rss conversion software?

...so what does anyone use for RSS/Atom/whatever?
I ended up using Feedbro in Firefox since it is just a standard "everything is handled locally" add-on vs damn near everything else that shows up when you look up "RSS feed reader" in a search engine.

>>9
I use newsboat, pretty much great used it for years.

>>5

IRC on the other hand just sucks, not only does no one use it any more but it's also unencrypted.

Many communities still use IRC, but the real difference is not quantity, but in quality. Most Discord "servers" are just endless repetitions of people saying "Hi", "Hru?", and "Hbu?" without ever saying something akin to a real conversation, unlike on IRC, where you can actually find people, who talk to each other beyond just greetings and conversation starters. Of course this doesn't amount to every Discord "server" and every IRC channel, but it's true to a degree. Discord is to chatrooms, what 4chan is to imageboards: a place, where nothing of value is ever discussed, but a lot of noise happens, and people confuse this noise for social interaction, which then fuels their addictions to those places.

As to IRC not being encrypted, it's true that there is TLS implemented and sometimes even enforced, but this of course doesn't mean the whole chat can't be read by a third party. I think simplicity goes over security and IRC is a particularly good protocol, because it isn't secure, doesn't need to be and is very KISS. Security-obsessed people will always find ways to justify more nonsense, but as a matter of fact, you shouldn't use IRC for anything, where you don't want anybody to find out anyway. It's a public chat after all.

XMPP is quite cool too

>>11
I quite like irc, but what's stopping me from using it as a standard communication is that, most don't support server-side logs.
I just want to know what happened when I left.

>>13
I can't blame you. Honestly, the most annoying thing is that this has been a solved problem on IRC, and there's no good reason for more IRC networks to not have something like HistServ (which does exist, it's just not common at all), which emits a portion of the history only to your client.

https://suricrasia.online/sortition/
cool thing I found using RSS:

Sortition social is a community RSS feed reader. Every day, a random feed is selected from our database and added to the timeline. After seven days, the feed falls off the end of the timeline and is replaced by a new one at the top.

>>15
thanks that is pretty cool

>>14

I can't find much (or better, nothing really) about HistServ.

Do you have some links to it?

>>13
just setup a bouncer lol

>>17
wow, google and shit really do bring up nothing
histserv is a feature in the ergo IRC server that injects chat history when you join a channel

people like platforms over protocols because of marketing and integration
no one is marketing IRC or RSS, but Discord and Twitter/X are spewed everywhere

at least some big sites still do RSS (you can put a YouTube channel page into your RSS reader to follow it, for example)
but they don't really promote it to end users, probably because the RSS user experience in 202X is abysmal and you get dumped into a pile of raw XML if you aren't already in-the-know about RSS

I guess when it comes to protocols, I do see people using xmpp a fair bit.

>>18
the fact that bouncers are the solution for keeping up on IRC is some shit

protocols
platforms

I prefer people (and money) over protocols, platforms.

people like

people do what they've been told (by ad/propagenda/mass hypnosis/authority)

no one is marketing

google, fb & some other big tech marketed XMPP, usenet when they benefitted from getting users(money/control) from it. then ditched it.
same with open source, crypto, dotcom bubble, internet, alt-left, liberals.