I’ll start:
- RSS and blogs, news vs. social media
- XMPP vs. WhatsApp/FB messenger/Snapchat
- IRC vs. Matrix, Teams, Discord etc.
- Forums vs. Social media, Reddit, Lemmy(?)
Honestly, if the FOSS community wants better adoption of these technologies, there needs to be an stronger emphasis on presentation and UI/UX.
The general public isn’t interested in using something that looks janky, behaves glitchy, or requires fiddling with settings to get looking nice.
Say what you want about that, I’m not defending it. I think people should care more about content and privacy/freedom vs just shiny things, but that isn’t the world we live in right now.
The big tech corpos know this, companies like Apple have become worth trillions by taking existing tech and making it shiny, sexy, and seamless.
Maybe that is just antithetical to FOSS principles. I don’t know what is the correct approach. All I know is I’ve heard so many folks who are curious about trying out FOSS software give it up because they encounter confusing, ugly, buggy user experiences.
Some FOSS products have figured this out, Bitwarden, Proton Mail, and Brave Browser have super polished and clean UX and generally are as or more stable than their closed-source counterparts.
Sad truth. I’m super happy with my FOSS experience overall, but I’m also a techie and very open to tinkering with stuff.
OP, I like several of your examples though. Lots of the old school tech is really solid. Just needs a clean fast front end in many cases.
My choice is Vim and its variants. Add some plugins, it’s a really great way to write code. I have no interest in GUI IDEs anymore since getting my NeoVim installation set up and tuned.
@Skooshjones @privsecfoss @foss Also, another reason why big tech catches on, every time, is not so much that the UX is glossy but that Zoom, Apple, etc, all know that #Accessibility is needed to, 1, be dominant. As people look for stuff and tools that are accessible to Disabled users, Apple and Zoom come up a lot because they knew that capturing accessible design was a great way to capture a huge portion of users and otherwise. 2. Accessible design works for everybody. Seriously, having a far cleaner UI is better for everybody, including developers when they need to change code later.
That’s a fair point, I’ve been happy to see that issue addressed more seriously in the last few years by many apps, including color schemes for folks with diminished sight or color blindness.
It would be interesting to create an open standard for app accessibility. Maybe that already exists, idk. But devs and organizations could submit their software to be evaluated and if passed, would be able to include a certification that it meets said accessibility standards.
There is one for web site developers. You are meant to follow guidelines proposed by the WCAG and ADA.
I saw somewhere recently (don’t remember if it was on Lemmy, reddit, or elsewhere), where a couple of folks were getting into it because a FOSS contributor didn’t recognize the importance of accounting for accessibility in design. They thought that projects as whole did not have a responsibility to account for those design considerations, and that anyone who wants to see those implemented have to do it themselves. While technically the truth in that this is all effectively volunteer work and developers work on what they want to work on, it’s something that could be alleviated by making it a core value of FOSS development. Asking questions like:
- This is a point-click-drag interaction, but how would a person do this with a keyboard only?
- These two components are identified using color, but what if a user is colorblind?
- There are buttons labeled with iconography only, but what if a user cannot see it and uses a screen reader to interact with everything?
It’s tough because the disability community in aggregate face steeper financial hurdles for a number of reasons, and could perhaps benefit the most from freely available, accessible tech.
@omarciddo It’s especially ironic because these very Disabled people would be the biggest champions of FOSS if FOSS software was designed to be accessible from the ground up, or at least more development tools made it easier to do these things but the very people that could benefit the most from FOSS are completely shunned/left to fend for themselves constantly, while still unable to use your FOSS software at all, and then people wonder why big tech continues to capture that market. @foss
Linux will never be main stream popular unless it becomes pre-loaded on major brand laptops and computers, however good the desktop enviroments and apps are. This is the thing that doesn’t get much talk, but however seemless and easy to install most modern Linux distros people just aren’t installing their OS’ in the first place. Most people either get their OS pre-installed or ask their local Geek Squad to do it for them.
Valve basically proved this with the Steam Deck. Lots of folks were introduced unknowingly to Linux via that method and realized it’s pretty great.
But Valve worked and still work their asses off to get the Steam Deck UI/UX really nice. There were a lot of bumps early on, but things are really good now. Proton works amazingly well, and the look and feel of the Deck is incredible.
I have hope with Framework, System76, and other companies like that which are making computers that work well with, or exclusively are built for Linux. Hopefully they continue to grow the market.
Yes, absolutely, but sadly the Steam Deck and S76 workstations are still niche products, focusing on the gaming and SoftDev markets.
Framework is very promising and I hope they’ll succeed breaking into more mainstream markets. But I’m really saddend by Canonical and that they dropped the ball with it because back in the day they made some attempts to partner with larger laptop vendors to pre-load Ubuntu and I think it also had great promise even tho Linux software was not nearly as refines as it is today. But nowadays when the software is much more capable they focus their efforts almost exclusively on business / server side applications.
Even more frustrating that Chromebooks became a thing. It proved that consumers were ready to buy cheap notebooks with an OS that was basically just a browser and no significant computer power.
Any user-friendly Linux distro could have filled that role and done it much better IMO. That one always felt like on of Linux’s biggest misses recently. I don’t think it was anybody’s fault either. Google had the resources, the marketing, and the vision to push those, right place right time.
There might be some traction if those laptops and desktops were a little cheaper than those preloaded with Windows.
True. The problem with that, is that Microsoft pays to have windows installed. Such that it’s actually cheaper to buy a system with windows and delete it than to buy one with Linux preinstalled.
Ah that’s probably how they’re able to squeeze Linux out of the market by having it OEM installed at cost.
Not that there are a lot of ordinary people who know what Linux is, much less desire to actively use it if it comes preinstalled on their machine.
One issue is that Microsoft makes so much on data collection, that they actually pay manufacturers to put Windows on there, it’s one of the methods used to try to keep stock computer prices low. While this is scummy and anticompetitive, it helps the consumer and gives me a chuckle that installing Windows inherently decreased the worth of a computer.
Yeah, they could have taken the high road compared to Google and Amazon, but instead went: Hold my beer.
Yeah. When a Chromebook can satisfy the needs of a lot of users, I feel some distros were ready even a decade ago.
The installation step is a huge hurdle. I don’t know anyone, except techies, who has done it and even some techies haven’t. You can make it pretty (and some installers are both pretty and dead simple) but getting it on a thumb drive and booting from external media are just not user-friendly steps.
UI/UX has always been a massive problem in F/OSS. The biggest issue is that you need one person, or a team, with a coherent design vision, actual UI/UX understanding, and who will make sure that not every random pull request related to UX is accepted and ensure those contributions align with the design vision.
That rarely happens
Yeah makes sense. I wish there was a FOSS UX design philosophy that had caught on. For app design, the Unix philosophy has driven development even to this day, although not as popular now as it once was.
We sort of have bits of it, with the GTK framework and KDE styling. But those ecosystems don’t extend outwards enough, and still allow far too much leeway to the UX design to ensure nice looks/function.
Maybe the nature of the widely distributed development makes it overall impossible. The goal of FOSS makes that kind of universal look and feel largely impossible. Heck, even Microsoft can’t get that to happen in their own OS. There are many applications/utilities that look pretty much the same now as they did on Windows XP or even earlier.
The general attitude of function over form in our community also makes it hard, and I get that. Especially with limited dev resources as you pointed out. Would you rather have better functionality, or a prettier interface? Tough choice sometimes.
I think another problem is that since FOSS is not profitable, it mostly attracts people who want to make software “for themselves” - “hey I need a tool that can do X and if I make it public maybe the other people will like it”. And that’s good but that means the software isn’t “for people” it’s “for people like me”, which is programmers. So they make UI that programmers like/understand but not an average Joe. I think FSF needs to invest some money to build a welcoming UI for existing, feature-complete tools.
Definitely. Programmers and super users, tend to be the kind of people that want configurability and are able (and even enjoy) to figure out what they are trying to do by themselves. If they have a question or a problem, the solution is usually one search away. But that doesn’t fly for the average person who wants the thing to work out of the box without having to dig into menus and settings.
My personal experience is that it is really hard to make app that works perfect and looks nice. It takes three to four times more time than just making and app that works with few glitches. Additionally, that is the boring part, not many developers will do it for fun, I really admire complex open source apps (like AntennaPod) that are beautiful and glich free.
Isn’t that a type error? The examples given were for protocols, but your specific objection was about clients. There are many amazingly smooth clients for the aforementioned protocols. They may not be popular, you might not like them, but they definitely exist.
We should also briefly take note of the disastrous UI that Microsoft Office has.
Fair point, but I’ll push back a little on your second point. RSS for instance. I really want to like it, but I just cannot get it to work smoothly.
I’ve tried like 8+ FOSS RSS clients, mobile, desktop, web-based. Not one of them has worked seamlessly. I get all kinds of weird problems. The RSS link doesn’t work, thumbnails don’t load, feed headlines are garbled, articles are badly out of order, sync doesn’t work, etc.
I know that if I can’t get them to work right, there’s no way a random person on the street is gunna be willing to tinker and mess around with them.
You bring up a really good point about MS Office UI. Very cluttered and clunky, but so many people are used to it that it doesn’t matter to them. I actually think that Only Office and Libre Office are easily good enough to replace Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for 90% of users out there.
As someone who has written and maintained an RSS aggregator for years, I can tell you that this jankiness is in big part because of how vague and under-defined the feed formats (RDF, RSS2, Atom) are, and how “creative” various websites are in producing feeds which are just barely standard-compliant, but also just enough screwed up to cause problems when parsing them.
It was a headache after a headache trying to get all the weird corner cases handled.
You bring up a good point with utilities like Bitwarden and Proton Mail; things that look nice and have good functionality attract the average user much more easily.
Last I checked, Bitwarden doesn’t have any way to hit a hotkey and insert login credentials in the current app? It also can’t be unlocked with biometrics?
Those aren’t “nice” features, they’re baseline features that every password manager needs to have. I don’t just type passwords into a browser, so a browser extension alone isn’t enough. And I’m not typing my umpteen character long password fifty times a day, there needs to be biometrics.
I will always choose open source software over closed source software - but not if it means choosing mediocre software over good software.
At least with android 13, you can choose the bitwarden app as your default autofill option, and it will fill login info in apps/websites/etc. That being said, I’ve noticed sometimes it won’t pop up immediately, but it’s by far the minority of situations where it does that.
This has been a feature for years - Android 10 at least, if not earlier.
Bitwarden 100% has biometric unlock (at least on Android, can’t speak for other platforms); as mentioned by @pattern, you can set it up to autofill login info in apps and websites. It does sometimes take a bit of time to show up, though.
Anecdotal experience, I know, but I managed to cure my wife of her habit of storing passwords in plaintext on her computer by moving her to Bitwarden, and I’ve had very little in the way of tech support to deal with in that area ever since, so at least for me it passes the “good for non-tech savvy folks” test.
Huh, turns out it does now! Definitely didn’t when I last tried the desktop app.
On the app page Bitwarden has the typical biometric symbols. And other FOSS alternatives also have biometric unlock. I use Keepass for example. On my desktop computer it is pretty easy to fill in passwords in my browser and on my phone it is very easy to open the database via biometrics. However, non of the clients actually have a nice and shiny GUI…
That’s why I don’t suggest Keepass to people vs Bitwarden, even though it’s quote good, I know they’re gunna be put off instantly by Keepass’s ugly look.
Honestly though, all the mainstream password managers have pretty nasty looking interfaces IMO, so maybe it actually wouldn’t matter lol.
FOSS is going to struggle to have good UX forever becuase you usually need one coherent vision for good UX and that’s the antithesis to FOSS projects, the only exceptions being ones run exclusively by one company.
Sadly, oftentimes, Forums are replaced by discord, despite… how different those are.
And, discord is inferior in so many ways. Not only you can’t easily search for the content, you also need an account on centralized proprietary software, that also is quite resource heavy. Not to mention the privacy concerns.
Discord servers are also closed communities which makes it impossible to search for info through search engine
Yep. It is a bit funny, and sad to see how we are regressing, despite the technology going forward…
There are opt in bots in deveopment that allows individual servers to be indexed for search engine visibility
Which you just know nobody is going to bother with installing on their guild.
It’s also very hard, if not impossible in some cases to find old conversations on discord, vs forums where they’re mostly preserved for eternity.
Not to mention how crappy the linux client is for linux users (I use one of those “thirdparty” clients myself, since the linux client is unbearable)
trying to have an async conversation over time on Discord (and other IM solutions) is garbage compared to forum threads. While Discord added threading, in my experience not enough people have either adopted it ,or use it properly.
I’m hoping Discord is passing phase I can largely ignore. I will deal with it if I need to but it seems like world of proprietary crapware.
Software, services come and go, so maybe, soon enough…
Forums and Wikis vs. Discord
Yes I know, they shouldn’t serve the same purpose, but oftentimes nowadays
peoplecommunities use discord when they should use a forum or a wiki.Discord is not even remotely comparable and whoever think that it is (not saying you OP) don’t understand the basics on how internet works.
To put it simply:
You can’t search the content of a discord server on the publicly available internet. You need to be on discord and for that, the server need to continue to exists. To top it all, things you might search are written all over the place (channels, threads, etc) and the search is clearly the search is a “chat” search, as it should be, thus terrible to actually find what you need.
Problem is that mostly those communities develop naturally and then there is a point where people join a discord and search years worth of discussion in multiple channels for some info.
This could of course have been a forum with threads all along but then users would have to create an account for all those niche forums… I get how this happens, but it still sucks.And that is where activitypub is a godsend.
You forgot the biggest most originalist one of all. Email.
Yes, often overlooked. And, I hear, almost impossible to selfhost these days without a degree in CS, because “we block all non big tech e-mail providers”.
Probably even with a CS degree.
It’s just a hassle to maintain, and too mission critical to have it go down.
I wonder if the same won’t happen with the fediverse, if we let some instances get too large.
I have a degree in CS… actually spent some time implementing email protocol as part of a class to send test messages through I think websockets in Java or something. It was really interesting and kind of a cool project.
Yeah, I ain’t touching that shit. I’ll more than happily let my domain name provider manage that for me so I can focus on
bigger and better thingsgoing through yet another Civilization 5 Vox Populi campaign.Going down isn’t the problem. Keeping an email server alive isn’t difficult.
Your messages getting summarily rejected by just about everyone is the problem.
Yea and no. The email “big tech club” happened under a pretense of spam blocking because back then spam and bots were a new concept. We now know a bit more about it and have anti-spam measures built into, e.g. even lemmy so I don’t think big tech will be able to use spam itself to piggy back on. At the same time Facebook has already announced Fediverse integration, and while there’s a petition to defederate from it as soon as they bring their servers up - what’s going to happen if Facebook+Twitter+Reddit decide to hop on the fediverse bandwagon? There’s just too much juicy content there right now. The FOSS Fediverse will have a tough time choosing between accessing all of that juicy content or keep the team values up. Now all of the mentioned sites are in decline, so as long as FOSS fediverse gains momentum faster than Big Tech unites I think we’re safe.
The Facebook bit is my concern as well.
However, I’m not so sure we’d be able to avoid it, even if big tech did not get involved.
For example, beehaw.org does not federate with a lot of other instances. How long until a few big lemmy instances decide they are important enough to block every new instance by default? Probably not going to happen anytime soon, but it could be a foreshadowing.
I think people should be incentivised to join the smaller instances. But I guess most new people coming to the fediverse don’t know that you can talk with other instances.
Well critical mass is the issue here. Social media sites are “fun” only if there are people there posting, talking. So it’s perfectly fine is there are say, 5 fediverse isolated islands that don’t talk to each other as long as each island has critical mass it‘ll be sustainable.
Also the benefit of fediverse is that I don’t need to understand that different communities are on different instances - I just go into search and find communities I want. Yeah some will have funky @names appended to them but I don’t need to understand what that means in order to interact with those communities.
I can’t quite find the blog post but I saw someone do a blog post using AWS’ map reduce on multiple servers to process a dataset… and then they redid their pipeline using bash, awk, and maybe grep and a single 8-core machine did it 100 times or so faster.
Edit: found it https://adamdrake.com/command-line-tools-can-be-235x-faster-than-your-hadoop-cluster.html
I think you can put this under the Linux command line. I.E. the bash shell and the commonly installed Linux command set. Way powerful for certain things.
I think this is more of a problem of knowing when a specific tool should be used. Probably most people familiar with hadoop are aware of all the overhead it creates. At the same time you hit a point in dataset sizes (I guess even more with “real time” data processing) where it’s not even feasible with a single machine. (at the same time I’m not too knowledgeable about hadoop and bigdata, so anyone else feel free to chime in)
Some context though is that this article was written when cloud computing was all the buzz like crypto just was and AI is now. So many people used cloud just for the buzz and without understanding the tool (same with crypto and AI now)
i3wm
It’s now more than a decade old and considered feature-complete 2 years back. But the basic usage is still the same since its initial launch. No matter how many versions of Windows or Gnome or KDE come and go, I use i3 in the same as I did when it launched. I don’t need “new” features because the existing features are more than enough.
This. After the initial learning for i3wm I never looked back.
And I dread the times where I have to use something else (work environment…)
I fell completely in love by the look and practicality of what i see and listen about i3wm. It all started when exploring unixporn on reddit.
It’s one of the things that make me sad for not being linux-savvy and even if I was I couldn’t use it for my daily driver because my company/team work is based on the whole Microsoft Office ecossystem.
So I just contemplate the minimalist beauty of it.
sway is the wayland based modern alternative that I use (and prefer). It does not do anything flashy and most i3 config options work just the same.
RSS was absolutely the shit
Still is.
Do people not use it anymore? I still do. I follow a boatload of different youtube channels, webcomics, blogs, etc. If there’s some other way besides RSS to have all of those updates show up on a single page, I don’t know it.
That’s what I used twitter for tbh. Since everyone is on it it’s easy to follow people, get instant updates and maybe even discover something new through the people you follow and their likes. It’s really a shame it went to shit, it was the lurkers perfect tool, especially when it comes to artists or content creators.
Not everyone is on twitter, but lots (all?) of Content Management Systems and blogs have a RSS feed.
As an academic, I’m syndicated to several labs and research groups which have their own websites, but don’t care about being visible on Twitter.
do birds fly? do ducks duck?
There are not as many as before, but not as few as you might think. A lot of them are hidden these days (you have to inspect the page source), but they are still there.
Readers like feedly are able to find them if you just provide the URL to the website.
I’m not talking about CMS or blogs though, I mean individuals that are active on twitter. Redigit, the developer of Terraria doesn’t have an RSS feed but is active on twitter. Valheim devs often post sneak peaks of upcoming updates on their personal twitter accounts. Rebecca, creative director of warframe is active on twitter. Lots of twitch streamers or youtubers don’t have separate blog posts or sites, they just post on twitter about upcoming streams, videos or events. Webcomics and artists might have their own sites but generally its easier to discover new ones on twitter where they also often retweet other similar artists.
It’s probably different for academia and businesses but for me, a completely casual user that doesn’t contribute to twitter and instead just has a highly curated feed of things he likes, twitter was perfect before they started filling the feed with random crap I’m not even following. It doesn’t seem to me like RSS is a replacement for that.
What’s your setup? How do you aggregate different feeds to one page? Where do you find the feeds? I have so many RSS questions - everyone who uses it loves it and I want to understand it.
I use Feeder for Android and view everything from there. Notifies me of new posts. https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.nononsenseapps.feeder/
For like reddit I do https://teddit.net/r/[subreddit]?api&type=rss
For twitter I do https://nitter.net/[username]/rss
Can display things in groups or all together. Lists them chronologically. No need for an account. No need to visit the site.
Feedly is a pretty user friendly reader (but not open source, unfortunately).
All feed readers aggregate the results in one page if you want.
Most websites provide a feed (even YouTube channels), but it’s often hidden under the surface. You can inspect the page source, or you can pass the URL of the website to feedly (it’s usually able to find it for you).
The cool thing about RSS is that it’s open. If you don’t want to use a particular reader anymore, you can export your feeds as an opml file and import it in another reader. You’re not locked in.
Reddit kinda replaced that for me. With leaving Reddit, just today I’ve installed a rss feed reader on my laptop and phone.
Part of my rexxit so far has included me dusting off newsreaders and rss feeds again.
Im trying to find a good set up. Newsblur seems to be a front runner. I have nextcloud selfhosted, so I could use that with the $2.99 android app or I could pay for newsblur or feedly a few bucks each month.
Either way, having a self-curated feed of news these last few days has been pretty amazing. There is no algorithm tuned for engagement pumping news in my face. It’s just stories, articles, YouTube videos, and podcasts that I want to see (on my terms).
Fresh RSS is what I use, self hosted and the mobile web interface negates the need for an app. Though there is an app, I’m not a fan of it
After getting burned by Google killing Reader I decided to never use a 3rd party service again, and FreshRSS has served me well for years.
What I use as well it sgreat and I keep it open in a column on my side monitor all day so I can casually glance at the news whenever
any newsgroup recommendations?
The no algorithm part is pretty neat. Don’t know if you are referring to the Nextcloud News app. If that’s the case, it’s free on the f-droid app store.
IS still absolutely the shit 🙂
audacity. that shit was mature in the 1990s.
What did happen to Audacity? I remember there was some controversy about them years back, but are they good now?
In May 2021, after the project was acquired by Muse Group,[53] there was a draft proposal to add opt-in telemetry to the code to record application usage. Some users responded negatively, with accusations of turning Audacity into spyware.[54] The company reversed course, falling back to error/crash reporting and optional update checking instead. [55] Another controversy in July 2021[56] resulted from a change to the privacy policy which said that although personal data was stored on servers in the European Economic Area, the program would “occasionally [be] required to share your personal data with our main office in Russia and our external counsel in the USA”.[57] That July, the Audacity team apologized for the changes to the privacy policy and removed mention of the data storage provision which was added “out of an abundance of caution.”[56]
Audacity was probably, unknowingly, the first GPL program I directly used as a kid (as in, not a library or software on a server.) We had it on school computers and made silly voice recordings.
It was either that or Tux paint where we made silly drawings :)
It’s still one of the first things I install
I spent two (recent) years editing on Audacity before moving to a DAW.
Audacity still gets used often still because it’s just so much easier for tiny/terrible splice jobs
It’s hard to beat GIMP.
Hard to do anything with GIMP.
Jk
Kinda.
I’ve found that Krita is pretty easy to use and does most of the things I would otherwise have to use Photoshop for.
My kid uses krita with a drawing tablet, something I’m honestly not sure is even possible with gimp.
Seriously considering paying $10/mo for Photoshop just so I can replace my gimp with being encombured with bloat.
deleted by creator
Check out Photopea
I mean, In general I hate the rent-your-software trend, but 10 bucks a month for Photoshop isn’t bad and the FOSS alternatives are just not up to snuff for anything other than the most basic of tasks. I’m saying this as somebody who struggled through learning The GIMP years before I ever got my hands on a copy of Photoshop.
As much as I want to love it, the UX oh the UX
Idk, I only… Gimp along without Photoshop…
Better than photoshop 1000x times
Agree on RSS.
Don’t have enough experience with XMPP.
IRC is not a secure protocol, I think matrix takes the cake there. (although I really miss IRC)
Lemmy and Reddit do have an upvote feature and aggregation across different topics / communites, which I think it’s what old school forums lacked.
The real problem with IRC had always been that it didn’t really scale. It’s fine for a few hundred people, but eventually shit just breaks.
Undernet in its heyday supported tens of thousands of people. But yeah, a system that relays absolutely all messages to absolutely all nodes is going to fall over under the weight of billions of users.
XMPP is very underappreciated.
Helpful Wikipedia link (for those like me who had no idea what XMPP was): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMPP
It so is. The only protocol that might beat it once it gets a desktop client is SimpleX
I’m glad you mentioned SimpleX. I think it’s a really cool and promising idea, yet hardly anyone knows about it :(
On paper it was great, but in practice no one implemented it fully and while I don’t know why it is probably complicated.
Jabber was the way to go 10+ years ago but than everything stopped since no one managed to make clients for voice and video chat, than we just all dropped it.
I would call it big fail since it didn’t manage to materialize in usable form.
On the other hand, it is never too late to make new better protocol based on xmmp for modern times.
xmpp has clients doing voice and video - it has for years. It is p2p and falls over in some nat to nat situations, which is where stun/turn come in on the server. Check out jmp.chat - they built a voip phone service using xmpp clients.
I know they exists, but never got to the usability point we need.m, or even if it did it was too late.
If a sizable chunk of the Reddit community can move to an alpha/beta grade link aggregator platform that can’t handle the load because we believe in the decentralization or the instance’s mission or the overall concept of federation, why is it too late for the community to re-adopt a mature messaging platform that mirrors those ambitions?
Because messaging of that sort needs contacts and Redditors (including me tbf) don’t have friends.
The Thunderbird desktop mail client is far better (feature-rich, stable, interoperable) than any webmail or phone app mail client I’ve ever seen.
It’s also a great feed reader.
Microsoft Outlook, from what I’ve seen of it, is horrible compared to Thunderbird. Why anyone would use the former is beyond me. You can’t even easily see message headers, so how the hell are you supposed to know whether a message is legit?
Outlook
- hides email address => security issue; eases phishing (even beyond not showing whether it’s ensured valid)
- can’t have an inbox filter that moves emails and gives you a normal notification of unread email
- can’t have an inbox filter that is both server side and gives a desktop notification
- can’t save your reply email next to the replied to email in the inbox - but can in the folders
- can’t handle specific column orders (was it category before date then not working? sth like that)
I switched / had to switch at work. It works. I got used to it for the most part. But I’d much prefer using Thunderbird.
Because I’m using both now in both I never intuitively navigate to the delete button. Because the layout is different between the two.
thunderbird is not old looking though
Just wish it had native exchange activesync support, since we’re forced to use exchange accounts at work, and Microsoft no longer allows using M365 accounts directly via IMAP (you need to register applications in Azure that can instead use IMAP)
Stuck using BlueMail instead since it’s the only desktop client that mostly supports EAS. Aside from MailSpring but it had no calendar support despite being promised for years.
Can’t use Outlook since I’m on Linux and running a VM for it is a bit heavy. And I can’t stand outlook web.
Is it possible to set custom key-bindings yet? I loved Thunderbird ten years ago, and kept using it until the (kinda-janky, community-maintained) keyboard-binding extension broke. I have too many years of muscle-memory invested in my email flow to change that, but otherwise I’d love to come back to Thunderbird.
USENET. Replacements aren’t distributed, or make discussion group discovery difficult, or don’t have decent native desktop clients, or some combination of those.
You know any good guides about how to get started with Usenet?
Because clients can present very different interfaces, it’s difficult to point to a single guide, but the basic principles are simple enough: get a client, point it at a server ( https://www.eternal-september.org/ provides a free one if your ISP no longer has its own, but it doesn’t carry the alt.binaries subhierarchy), download the list of available groups, subscribe to a few, read, and enjoy.
As for which client, I use Pan, but that’s Linux-specific. For other OSs, I haven’t a clue. If you happen to use Thunderbird for email, I think it still has the necessary support.
Keep in mind, though: USENET died in part from lack of good moderation options, so all you can do about bad actors and spam floods is block messages from those posters from being visible in your client. Moderated groups did exist, but the system basically amounted to one person having to okay every single message posted, which meant there was a single point of failure. For instance, when the moderator of rec.arts.anime.info died unexpectedly, it became impossible for anyone to post to the group.
90% of the news hierarchy is a wasteland these days anyway—I use it mostly for monitoring some of the mailing lists from my Linux distro, which happen to have a USENET repeater. The only other area doing well is the binaries groups.
If you’re interested in running a server, start by making sure you have a good-sized data pipe—I’m not sure what the average size of a feed is now, but ten years ago it was measured in the tens of gigabytes per day (mostly binaries).
Oof, that’s rough. (Paragraphs 3-4, I mean.) Thanks, I appreciate the info. At the very least, it’ll be a good starting-off point. :)
The other thing I would advise is reading RFC 1855: Netiquette, section 3.0 (One-to-many communication) and 3.1.3 (NetNews guidelines), as anyone still hanging out in the discussion groups is likely to be an ancient being like me who gets hung up on things like quoting protocol.
anyone still hanging out in the discussion groups is likely to be an ancient being like me
Wait, that makes it sound like Usenet is dying… Is it really that empty? :(
Usenet use to be great. Predated forums and Reddit. Frankly the threadiverse is just now going a bit back to that concept.
I miss the days when usenet was a standard part of most ISPs included offerings.
Hopefully the fediverse can get wnought traction to grow some vibrant communities like we used to enjoy in heyday of the old newsgroups.
CompuServe was pretty good too but very expensive. So not somethimg I care to go back to.
Not much. That’s the thing about FOSS—it keeps getting better. It is not subject to enshittification like e.g. Windows is.
