[ih] Preparing for the splinternet

[Ofer Inbar]

On Mon, Mar 14, 2022 at 02:58:00PM +0000,
Dan York via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> I think a critical element with both IRC and NNTP (of which I was a strong user of both) and similar other technologies based on open standards was, and still is???  *user experience* (UX).
> 
> I remember very well in the mid-2000s when many of us were working on VoIP systems based on the Session Initiation Protocol. We were working hard to get SIP to a place where it could replace H.323 and other various proprietary protocols. We were making progress on many different fronts, but there was a lot of complexity involved with making SIP work in so many different network configurations. 
> 
> Then along came Skype with its extremely simple UX. You just installed the software and??? ta da??? you were making audio calls to people. And it was SO SIMPLE that ???anyone??? could install Skype on their computer and have it ???just work???. 
> 
> We saw this happen with messaging with IRC and also Jabber/XMPP. ???Regular??? users got used to the increasingly sophisticated UX of proprietary messaging apps like WhatsApp, Apple???s iMessage, Facebook Messenger, Skype, and many others. 
> 
> Those consumer experiences drove enterprise/organization expectations. And IRC clients and Jabber clients just couldn???t keep up.
> 
> Along came Slack with its slick UX and??? poof??? people started leaving IRC and XMPP networks for the simplicity and ???just works??? UX of Slack. ????. (And now other similar proprietary messaging systems.)
> 
> In both the case of Skype and Slack, they are centralized systems/services using proprietary protocols.

Two big tradeoffs I've seen affect this over the course of the past
few decades on the net, that I don't think I've seen fleshed out in
this thread.

A. Centralization & speed of development

When you centralize the service and make the protocol proprietary,
it allows for much faster feature development.  The same company
fully controls the clients and server side, and can make rapid changes
to the protocol to support changes in functionality.  Open protocols
are bound to develop much more slowly and lag behind.

On the other side of the tradeoff, open protocols allow many different
clients and give the user a choice.  So many things I dislike about
Slack and Discord's user-side that I would've solved on IRC by
choosing the client that does what I want, for example.  And with
email, we still have that in part, except that a lot of people are
kind of stuck with their organization's choice of email provder.
But can still choose something else for their personal email.

Unfortunately, even with choice of clients, they're still constricted
by the slow development of the protocol.  There were a number of IRC
clients (well, probably still are) that are easy to install and easy
to use and auto-configure, but that still won't give you easy user
discovery, for example.

This isn't the whole story, but it's a big part of the story: More
people prefer the benefits of the proprietary side of this tradeoff
than the open side.  The kinds of features that a proprietary protocol
can deliver in months but would take an open protocol decades, are a
big reason why in many spheres they have taken over.

B. Who stores and who pays

Remember the "social media" of the early web?  Home pages and web
rings.  Your "profile" was your home page.  Your "friends list" was
often literally a page called "friends" but sometimes "links" that
linked to a bunch of other people's homepages, with brief notes about
each of them and why you were linking to them.  And then your home
page could also link to your photo gallery, etc.

Tripod and Geocities and others of that era kind of adopted this
model, by providing a service where you could very easily make a
homepage, and link to others, but they shifted it in a big way:
you no longer had to find a host for storing your web data, because
this one big centralized company was willing to just store it for
you.  But once that happens, there's a very big incentive for them
to attracted everyone else you might be interacting with, and to use
that critical mass of lots of people on the same host to develop new
features that go beyond just hyperlinks.  But the more special
features only work when everyone involved is on the same hosting
service, the less of an open web it is.

Usenet doesn't require the individual end user to find a place for all
their newsgroups to be stored, but it does mostly rely on sites to
volunteer to store and forward a lot of content that isn't all for
their own users.  So then you get things like Digg and Reddit that
offer to store all of it in one centralized place for everyone, and
support it with ads, and the dynamic seems pretty similar from there.

  -- Cos