Responding to an ill-informed rant about SMS (the mobile phone message service), I highlighted parallels to the ranter’s proposal, and it got me wondering: Why do some proprietary services so easily replace open protocols, while others don’t?

The rant was ultimately demanding that we give up using SMS, instead using WhatsApp, a proprietary messaging services owned by Facebook. This is a clearly horrible idea, and suggested some parallels.

We should give up using RSS for podcasts, instead let’s use Spotify. (NO!)

We should give up using HTTPS, instead let’s use a new protocol owned by Facebook or Google to visit web pages. (NO!)

We should give up using email, instead let’s use a proprietary messaging app. (NO!)

We should give up using IRC, instead let’s use Slack. (Most of us already have!)

Spotify’s effort to own podcasting is falling flat, fortunately. Attempts to build a Facebook-only subnet seem to have petered out as well. Replacements for email have come and gone (remember Google Wave? or Google Buzz?). But it seems like it took nothing at all for IRC to be tossed aside in favor of something new, anything new! If it weren’t Slack, it would be HipChat, or Discord, or something else.

There’s a lesson to be learned here, and were I a paid pundit, I’d declare what it is with confidence, and return to the theme repeatedly over the next few months to emphasize just how right I was.

But I’m not a paid pundit, and I don’t know what the answer is. I’m not sure there is a single answer.

At its peak, IRC wasn’t as widely used as the others, or not as widely used by non-technical “normies” at least. RSS feeds for podcasts seemed like they could be as technically fiddly as IRC in the very early days, but people like @davew made sure that the experience was smooth and simple, and so it stands up more than 20 years later.

There have been extensions to HTTPS, like QUIC, but so far they’ve always been handled as extensions and implemented as open standards. Google’s biggest push toward centralizing the web was AMP, and enough people cared enough about that to push back until Google promised to stop emphasizing it in 2021.

Sometimes the most open technology wins, despite efforts by companies to extend or replace it. Sometimes it’s tossed aside so quickly people forget we once used something like Slack without paying anybody anything.

I’m not entirely sure why, but I’m on four Slack servers, 18 Discord servers, and only three IRC servers, so I guess I’m part of the problem.

#blog #nerdery