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Bring Your Own Client

geoffreylitt.com

211–220 of 262 posts

Re: Bring Your Own Client

#211
disclaimer: Markdown Notes App Author

At least for simpler text documents, where formatting isn't a big concern, markdown seems to be wining as the standard. Sure, each of these have added a few features on top of the markdown standard, but even those features are slowly getting quite standardized. [0][1][2][3][4][5][6]

[0] https://obsidian.md

[1] https://zettlr.com/

[3] https://dendron.so/

[4] https://foambubble.github.io/foam/

[5] https://logseq.com/

[6] https://gitjournal.io

I wish using Git as the VCS would also become more standardized, but we're still lacking good clients which hide the complexity [6] (my project, fails at hiding all of the complexity, but hopefully it'll get there)

Re: Bring Your Own Client

#212
Another great example of BYOC is SQL. Even despite popular relational databases have slightly different SQL dialects, it's still possible to use different clients to query/view/design/update a relational database.

Re: Bring Your Own Client

#213
>Today we generally think about BYOC at the “app” level. But can we go finer-grained than that, picking individual interface elements?

Maybe will will end up re-inventing OLE from the 1990's for the web. In OLE 2, there was a standard OLE Compound Document file storage API/format. Different apps could all work with different parts of a document. You could even change which app you wanted to handle a certain type of feature. It was complicated, but when it worked, it was pretty neat. This was done during the time when most people had maybe 4-8MB of RAM. With much more powerful CPUs and vast amounts of RAM, we could probably come up with something even better.

Re: Bring Your Own Client

#214
Immutability and mutability of content, and expectations or conventions surrounding it, seems to play a large role in feasibility here. The successful examples listed are generally cases where content is immutable to the general audience (someone produces content and then publishes it to others) or the way content is mutable is "understood" by the participants. That is, text editors mutate content, but no one expects there to be multiple editors of a text file, and the convention of a file is understood and encapsulates the "state" of the data.

In the wishful cases listed, collaboration is the norm, so to make it BYOC, you'd have to expose core "mutation" API or else use a general convention that is understood across the board.

In my dream world, we'd be use CRDTs for data and the "schema" of the data for a given "service" (say something like Google Docs) is open. The data storage layer would be a commodity and you can swap in different providers as you see fit. Of course, there is no benefit to the creators of such services to do this, and I don't think CRDTs are quite there yet with defining mutation efficiently with respect to multiple collaborators. However, from a data portability standpoint, it feels like the ideal to me.

Re: Bring Your Own Client

#215
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OTOH, give it time. Open alternatives exist for every private walled garden. I believe the decentralization/federalization and FLOSS movements have a real chance, even if they move at 0.05 velocity. Private platforms are subject to closure, but the light of an open source project will shine as long as there's someone spending time on it. In due time we'll have networks of small providers catering for BYOC hosting. Cr…

Maybe the best solution would be legislated government donations to open source projects, with a mandatory legislative bill each year on who they go to.

> with a mandatory legislative bill each year on who they go to.

Another option would be something similar to farm subsidies, although I don't know if that would be enough.

Re: Bring Your Own Client

#216
I'd love to be able to pay a music streaming service a monthly fee to play their catalog without having to use any of their first party software.

Re: Bring Your Own Client

#217
Great read! Just wanted to chime in and say I’m working on a collaborative editing backend [1] based on Y.js, which already makes some of the things you write about possible.

For example interop between different editors, like CodeMirror and Monaco. And thanks to Y.js, the server helps with syncing, but isn’t the single source of truth anymore. It’s more like Git, where every copy has all changes.

I really hope we all can leave the cloud behind soon.

[1] https://hocuspocus.dev

Re: Bring Your Own Client

#218
Interesting premise, but some of the examples given as BYOC wishlist is a little weird to me. Google doc (the main example) makes sense, sure.

With others like Notion -- I recently started using Notion at a personal level and I feel like much of the draw about Notion is basically the UI (client). I don't use it to publish public pages or anything, only private notes. Most of its usefulness to me comes down to it having a really nice client and it syncs between desktop/mobile/etc. I don't know what Notion would be without the built in client. Simply a set of markdown files?

Other examples like Trello / Asana seem to already have solutions. They offer APIs, and while I haven't worked with them to know them extensively, my understanding is you can do basic CRUD operations on tickets. You could possibly build your own clients there.

Re: Bring Your Own Client

#219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since HLX has become increasingly required, I've seen that the lock-in doesn't mean diddly squat. Now we're not "locked in", but for my new vendor to drop-in means I have to pay an extra "API Fee" for them to whip up the API interface to pull everything from the old EMR and into the new EMR. So either we get to the point where we are legislating perfect compatibility (and I can't imagine how good EMRs will get once t…

I saw that you doubled down on [this comment]( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26181228 ). Week 5 excess mortality for 65+ in Israel is now up to 7.4 times above normal. It increased every update for the last three weeks. Unbelievable that people like you take 1 minute to read something, think you are an expert and try and proclaim victory. I'm 100% sure you will double down again instead of taking the honorable…

I made my comment two weeks ago, describing a fall in mortality that began three weeks prior. The z-score of mortality for Israel peaked as I described in my last post, and has continued to fall. The 65+ group in particular is well within historical norms.

The aggressiveness of your statement requires me to include an image of the current mortality graph for anyone not willing to take the time to dig it out themselves: https://ibb.co/1vCsD7Y

People like you never get held accountable. Please continue thread-stalking me, I'm happy to keep this up.

Re: Bring Your Own Client

#220

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…

don't see widespread BYOC ever happening without government intervention

This is why people don't like nerds, it's like you actually want to fuck up this industry. The number of users that care about this is a rounding error. What you're talking about is increasing the complexity and flakiness of every product through modularization. Have you ever actually shipped a product for the general public?

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