FTP vs HTTP

Posted Jan 30, 2017 10:26 UTC (Mon) by drag (guest, #31333)
In reply to: FTP vs HTTP by tao
Parent article: Shutting down FTP services (kernel.org)

There are a number of instant/secure messaging apps and protocols out there. Probably any one of them would be better then email. Anything that verifies the sender is the actual sender would be better. Email sets the bar pretty low.

If I was to try to create a email replacement tomorrow I'd probably make a jabber extension that supports a intermediate offline receive and store with html formatted messages.

But you are missing the point a bit, I expect. Email not used because of any sort of technical excellence in it's protocol. but due to social reasons. Convincing people to use _anything_ else is the problem.

FTP vs HTTP

Posted Jan 30, 2017 12:46 UTC (Mon) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (15 responses)

The beauty of email is that you can anonymously and quickly dash off an email to someone you've never met, and it's asynchronous... they don't have to read it or answer it right away.

That's also its downfall, of course.

FTP vs HTTP

Posted Jan 30, 2017 13:25 UTC (Mon) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (7 responses)

Yes, the social expectations of email are vastly different than instant messenger of any form. Usually the sender can see if you are online and (and even for texting) may expect prompt responses. Lack of a response can either invoke a feeling of panic for the recipient or resentment for a perceived shunning.

FTP vs HTTP

Posted Jan 30, 2017 16:54 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (3 responses)

It's like complaining why hasn't the phone replaced snail-mail? They serve very different purposes. If it was going to happen, that should have done so nigh on a century ago!

Cheers,
Wol

FTP vs HTTP

Posted Jan 31, 2017 11:32 UTC (Tue) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (2 responses)

> It's like complaining why hasn't the phone replaced snail-mail?

That does not resemble anything I said at all.

FTP vs HTTP

Posted Feb 3, 2017 11:31 UTC (Fri) by Tet (guest, #5433) [Link] (1 responses)

It's actually exactly what you said. You're comparing synchronous and asynchronous communication mechanisms. Just like phone and snail mail. Instant messaging will never replace email because they do different things.

FTP vs HTTP

Posted Feb 3, 2017 19:06 UTC (Fri) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

There is certainly a continuum of communication technologies, we could go crazy and say

stone ->
books ->
web pages ->
email ->
IM ->
voice ->
video ->
in-person ->
telepathic?

FTP vs HTTP

Posted Feb 2, 2017 7:40 UTC (Thu) by micka (subscriber, #38720) [Link] (2 responses)

I don't know what the social expectations for IM are _in general_, but most people don't expect me to actually answer quickly. Maybe that's because I inadvertantly groomed everybody like this by disabling notifications (I do have notifications for mail on the other hand) and usually responding between 10 seconds and... very long. Worst case I had was more than 24 hours, being seen as online all this time.

FTP vs HTTP

Posted Feb 2, 2017 9:22 UTC (Thu) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (1 responses)

One thing that makes a difference is that modern IM services show you a richer set of statuses than just "online", "away", and "offline"; you have a per-message status telling you whether the message is still private to you, has reached the recipient but not been seen yet (is visible in the chat window, but the user has not interacted with the chat window since the message became visible), or has probably been seen (you've opened the chat window with the message in, and interacted with a UI element that's visually below the message, typically), plus usually a "typing" indicator to tell you that the recipient is crafting a response.

Thus, if I'm communicating with someone like you, I can see that the message is available for you to read, but that you haven't yet seen it. I can also see that you've probably seen it, and aren't yet typing a response, and I can see that you've seen it, but that you're crafting the perfect reply and I should wait for you to finish typing before I poke again.

In some situations, that extra information is useful - it reassures me that the lack of a response is not you ignoring me, but you ignoring the machine completely. In others, perhaps not so much - do you want your boss to know that you've seen a message they think is polite and reasonable but that you're ignoring it for 24 hours while you calm down enough to reply nicely?

FTP vs HTTP

Posted Feb 2, 2017 11:03 UTC (Thu) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

Personally I would disable that sort of data leakage, ick.

FTP vs HTTP

Posted Jan 31, 2017 11:28 UTC (Tue) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (6 responses)

I understand that.

I wasn't claiming that you would replace email with IM. The example I gave was a possible way you could extend jabber to use it for offline messages.

It's not the concept of Email that sucks.. it's the email protocol that sucks. It's insecure, spam is a constant problem and it's a nightmare to manage.

So far the best approach that people have discovered to deal with email is 'Lets all use Gmail and let Google deal with this nonsense'.

FTP vs HTTP

Posted Feb 1, 2017 4:54 UTC (Wed) by Frogging101 (guest, #113180) [Link] (2 responses)

Which is a bad thing because it centralizes email to Google.

FTP vs HTTP

Posted Feb 1, 2017 13:15 UTC (Wed) by hkario (subscriber, #94864) [Link] (1 responses)

all the other protocols centralise IM to some provider too, and unlike for Jabber, Google will need to remain compatible with external providers

FTP vs HTTP

Posted Feb 3, 2017 5:54 UTC (Fri) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

Indeed: gmail *does* "deal with all that non-sense" required to communicate with the outside world. All alternatives ignore the problem by simply not talking to each other! We're in 2017 and there's still no open and universal messaging solution that doesn't suck; what a shame.

FTP vs HTTP

Posted Feb 2, 2017 2:47 UTC (Thu) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (2 responses)

I think you'll find that despite email's problems, it's almost certainly the most important communication mechanism in business. I know that in my job, 95% of my communication (other than actual face-to-face interaction) is via email. And I would hate to use any sort of non-email-like tool in its place.

Email for personal communication is (for me) less important. In a pinch, I could get by texting, Facebook messaging, IM, etc. But I still like email the best in many situations.

FTP vs HTTP

Posted Feb 8, 2017 10:39 UTC (Wed) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link] (1 responses)

Just left a startup where they were using primarily Slack for communication, with email barely ever used.

For discussion-oriented stuff, this worked well, where parties were feeding off each others ideas in relatively tight timescales.

For asynchronous communication that shouldn't be dropped, it was horrifyingly awful. And they were uninterested in changing the pattern. I couldn't understand it at all.

FTP vs HTTP

Posted Feb 8, 2017 14:02 UTC (Wed) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

The problem with Slack is that once something has scrolled off the top of the browser window it is very inconvenient to refer to. Sure, you can always scroll back to look at it, but if you want to reply to something somebody said three screenfuls ago it is a hassle to re-establish the proper context.

Some of the open-source Slack competitors (such as Mattermost or Rocketchat) actually do this better, at least to a certain degree.

FTP vs HTTP

Posted Jan 30, 2017 13:30 UTC (Mon) by tao (subscriber, #17563) [Link] (3 responses)

The problem is that the most popular of those instant/secure messaging apps (Whatsapp) is proprietary and locked to phones (there's a web client, but you need your phone running to use it). Skype is proprietary too. I guess you could include Facebook too.

There are free protocols, it is possible to do offline storage, but none of the solutions actually *exist*.

And then there's the whole bit about threaded discussions. How would you possibly handle that?

No thanks. I love chat clients, but they do not replace e-mail. They complement e-mail nicely.

FTP vs HTTP

Posted Jan 31, 2017 11:35 UTC (Tue) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (2 responses)

I didn't say they didn't have problems.

The first requirement in something replacing email is going to be that it needs to be widespread as email. This is not a technical problem.

> And then there's the whole bit about threaded discussions. How would you possibly handle that?

Email is extremely bad at this.

FTP vs HTTP

Posted Jan 31, 2017 12:11 UTC (Tue) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (1 responses)

Email is extremely bad at this.

With e-mail this is largely up to the client program one is using. Some of them do a reasonably decent job, and if threaded discussions are important to you you can pick one that does.

On the other hand, with most IM services you get exactly one client program (possibly per platform). If that program decides threaded discussions aren't worth bothering with, then you're stuck with it whether you like that or not.

In a wider sense, in the end e-mail is just files that you can deal with (format, sort, save, forward, print, backup, …) however you wish. IM messages are usually bits of data on a server that you can't access except through the official IM client. I know what I prefer.

FTP vs HTTP

Posted Jan 31, 2017 12:50 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

> With e-mail this is largely up to the client program one is using. Some of them do a reasonably decent job, and if threaded discussions are important to you you can pick one that does.

Some clients mangle the relevant headers, breaking threads for everyone. I can stitch them back together in mutt, but unfortunately they don't sync with offlineimap.