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Bring Your Own Client

geoffreylitt.com

41–50 of 262 posts

Re: Bring Your Own Client

#41
post #25

>What would it look like to have a thriving ecosystem of third-party clients for Google Docs style word processing, which can all interoperate with each other, even supporting realtime collaboration? Well, based on decades of history of other complex file formats such as pdf, zip, and MS Office formats of doc, docx, xls, xlsx, etc... it would be a buggy mess. It didn't matter whether the format was reverse-engineered…

Maybe collaborate using markdown with stylesheets instead of word then.

As for the mbox problem: on a normal machine that must be shared between multiple tools (at the very least: biff,lmptpd, and the MUA) if thunderbird can't interoperate that's a serious bug.

Re: Bring Your Own Client

#42
post #18

The competitive advantages of owning both the application and the data are so high that don't see widespread BYOC ever happening without government intervention. I'd like to see an enforced separation in law between commercial application providers and storage providers. So, if someone writes an app like Google Docs, they can't just store the data opaquely on their own cloud servers. They legally have to integrate wi…

Interesting proposal, but I see it greatly reducing development and also further entrenching the cloud providers as Lords Of Everything.

Can I ask why?

As I see it, cloud providers are currently entrenched as Lords of Everything because they can both provide the infrastructure and the products that run on top of it. Making them act more like utility providers would reduce their power, I think.

Re: Bring Your Own Client

#43
post #5

This idea suffers from the same problem federation does. It's harder to move a whole ecosystem. Makes it harder to innovate. Leads to centralized platforms outperforming these BYOC/federated/open options. Basically how Reddit replaced Usenet with upvotes and basic spam filtering. There's more on this from 'moxie https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nj3YFprqAr8 https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/

> Reddit replaced Usenet Many things replaced Usenet. Usenet is more of a protocol (that uses NNTP) than a social media platform. If you're any way a systems thinker, you would know that protocols are more resilient than services .

NNTP is basically dead, maybe abused* for piracy in some corner of the Internet, while Reddit ate half of the web that Facebook didn't eat.

* To be clear, I'm rather ok with piracy. NNTP is just really poorly suited for it.

Re: Bring Your Own Client

#44
On Google Docs, there were some CLI tools that today are deprecated.

EDIT: not yet:

https://coderwall.com/p/elfkaq/editing-google-docs-with-vim

The best setup would be:

Wordgrinder/nvi+py3-markdown for Google Docs.

Sc-IM+GNUplot opening Google Sheets.

MagicPoint generating HTML files usable for Google Slides.

Rclone for Drive.

Re: Bring Your Own Client

#45
post #32
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has anyone tried to build real-time collaboration on git? What if every participant would run a system that saved on every keystroke, committed and synced with the remote? It would break due to conflicts as soon as two concurrent edits were too close to each other, but you could probably just accept either commit when they’re so granular and happening in real time. The conflict is going to be obvious and fairly easy…

I think that's close to what overleaf.com is doing for LaTeX.

That’s interesting. Their website mentions Git integration [1] but I don’t get the impression that their real-time editing is built on Git. Do you have a reference for that?

1: https://www.overleaf.com/learn/how-to/Using_Git_and_GitHub

Re: Bring Your Own Client

#46

The competitive advantages of owning both the application and the data are so high that don't see widespread BYOC ever happening without government intervention. I'd like to see an enforced separation in law between commercial application providers and storage providers. So, if someone writes an app like Google Docs, they can't just store the data opaquely on their own cloud servers. They legally have to integrate wi…

Even better: They have to use the storage provider of your choosing.

Re: Bring Your Own Client

#47

The competitive advantages of owning both the application and the data are so high that don't see widespread BYOC ever happening without government intervention. I'd like to see an enforced separation in law between commercial application providers and storage providers. So, if someone writes an app like Google Docs, they can't just store the data opaquely on their own cloud servers. They legally have to integrate wi…

We just have to do what the phone manufacturers did for the mobile phone connectivity. GSM was a huge hit thanks to interoperability.

Re: Bring Your Own Client

#50
post #5

This idea suffers from the same problem federation does. It's harder to move a whole ecosystem. Makes it harder to innovate. Leads to centralized platforms outperforming these BYOC/federated/open options. Basically how Reddit replaced Usenet with upvotes and basic spam filtering. There's more on this from 'moxie https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nj3YFprqAr8 https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/

Can you imagine a world where you could only use a specific phone model with a specific operator? or where you could only send text messages to people that is on the same network? If we can regulate phones we should be able to regulate social networks.
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