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(?)
  • Sploosh the Water
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    31 year ago

    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.

    • @ticho@social.fossware.space
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      1 year ago

      As someone who has written and maintained a 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.