[gbhn]

I have some direct experience with this. It is summed up as "open standards people are extraordinarily hard to work with, uncompromising, and subject to infinite fine splitting of the space. Meanwhile, 5 billion users do not care and want things to be easy, fast, work well, and be well integrated."

The result of these two forces is that it ends up being extremely difficult to work on open standards for any kind of data that people care about. (Users can't see HTTP, so it is fine to standardize. They can see blog titles, so... no dice.)

[thwarted]

"…Meanwhile, 5 billion users do not care and want things to be easy, fast, work well, and be well integrated."

They can see blog titles, so... no dice.)

Hard to place all of the blame on the open standards people if the other side doesn't want to do anything other than wall people in by not cooperating, with open standards or each other.

[Swizec]

As an enginner I really love and support open standards.

As a user I’m on Apple everything because shit just works and gets out of my way.

[Nicksil]

I feel you've way over-generalized here.

> open standards people

Who are "open standards people?" Are you talking about the individual folks who author/edit/audit/etc. RFCs? Or small-ish groups of people organized into a committee who then create and publish various standards? Or giant corporations and non-profits butting heads to eventually produce some semblance of an agreed-upon standard?

> 5 billion users do not care

5 billion people don't care? I'd argue that there are less. If you asked a selection of that population a question using terms and phrasing commonly used in tech circles their eyes will indeed likely glaze over and their reply will be equivalent to a "don't care" because they genuinely do not care about an open chat standard nor should they. However, asking something like "Would you like to be able to chat with the same friends, families, colleagues, using well-known identifiers[1], regardless of which application you use?" You may begin to hear some "care."

You see and hear a similar argument with the folks who argue that a majority ("most") of Internet users "don't care" that their information is being Hoovered up around every corner. If all we were asking is "Do you care that ostensibly non-identifiable information about you and your browsing habits is being transferred to <some service> so that <some service> is able to provide you with a pleasurable browsing experience," you'd likely get something along the lines of "don't care." Instead present the individual with every data point collected from them, along with what is inferred by their data in aggregate (and everything else that goes in that package), and couple that with the difference they may expect in browsing experience between continuing to permit <some service> collecting their data and not. Now that they've been asked a question, using words and terms with which they may be more familiar, you might begin to see a shift from _everyone_ not caring to some amount less. Or not.

[1] "well-known identifiers" is still eye-glaze inducing, but am too tired to come up with something better.

[gbhn]

By "open standards people" I mean "people who prefer open standards". Nothing more sinister than that. :-) (I am one, BTW)

This is already a very small subset of the population -- they've bothered to take a stand on something virtually no-one seems to care about. (At least not directly.)

This last part seems crucial to me. You're right that people care that they can chat with friends. It's the clause I think they glaze over at. Something about applications? I just want to chat!! Of course standards folks, being experts in this, care a lot, but messaging is a canonical example of this. I've personally witnessed years of strategy aimed at open standards go nowhere while proprietary standards win out. It's not because billions of people have strong preferences for open standards!

I do think that there are enough open standards fans, and enough open standards-adjacent folks, to make a strong play for something like messaging. But it's not "abstract XMPP" that's the problem -- it's "real XMPP" with fractures, federation headaches, delays in having it be caught up with capabilities of closed platforms, etc. That's the actual competitor. :-(

[arendtio]

I doubt that the standards are the cause. I mean we have XMPP and companies use it to build products but if they prefer to disable the federated features (as WhatsApp did back in the day) you can't blame the standard.

The problem seems to be more along the lines of 'standards don't make money'. So the problem is that companies implement those standards and they do so after their purpose which is to create value for the shareholders.

[dmitriid]

> I mean we have XMPP and companies use it to build products but if they prefer

they prefer standards and protocols that work well in the smartphone era. As late as 2016 XMPP had next to zero support for features expected in a mobile-first world: https://gultsch.de/xmpp_2016.html. Most XEPs in the article were at experimental stage or draft at the time, and are still in the same status nearly three years later. Some of them like XEP 0352 are "Implementation of the protocol described herein is not recommended for production systems".

[jblwps]

I'm too tired to really comment on this now, but this makes me think of a Signal blog post by Moxie[0] about the decision to disallow federation/third party Signal clients. Whether or not you ultimately agree or disagree with him (I'll admit I'm pretty convinced), it's a pretty good read and parallels very neatly with this topic here.

[0] - https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/