When you connect a new device to a 'smart' tv, you must pay homage to the manufacturer with a ritualistic dance. Plugging and unplugging the device. Turning them on and off in the correct sequence like entering a konami code.
Every time you want to switch devices, the tv must scan for them. And god forbid you lose power, or unplug something. You are granted the delight experience of doing it all over again.
I have fond memories of the days of just plugging something in, and pressing the input button. Instant gratification. It was a simpler time.
What is some other tech that used to be better?
Like Matrix the clients aren’t all equivalent without feature parity (& no concept of the flagship or implementation client). For desktop, Gajim has the most power user features but issues rendering in smaller windows like a tiling split (& being written in Python has other issues). Dino is feature-complete & calls tend to always work—great if not connected to tons of chats. Profanity is the best TUI which is very fast but usability is really good for some things & really bad for others (like accepting no OMEMO keys). I use all three depending on the environment & task. Android it is a lot clearer where Cheogram takes the cake for me being a Conversations fork but with OLED black support as well as webxdc. For the web, Movim has the best UX/feature set & can be used anywhere a browser can with PWA support. You can also just check to see what provide OMEMO: https://omemo.top/.
ActivityPub is a JSON-based protocol for seems primarily built for social networks, with the DMing experience normally not being secure or particular fast. XMPP is largely for building networks for passing messages & client presence—which can be extended to support PubSub like MQTT. It isn’t normally built for social networks but Movim & Libervia have extended XMPP to be a social network.
Hmm. Looks like Libervia is working on bridging XMPP and ActivityPub, as well.
I was just thinking, I don't know ins and outs of it all, but ActivityPub is often compared to Matrix, so if XMPP is a better version of Matrix does that mean ActivityPub could be improved upon?
Don’t quote me on it, but I don’t believe Matrix could be extended to be a social media platform. It’s just more limited in its capabilities as JSON is not a very extensible format.
I don't know either, but ActivityPub definitely uses (a version of) JSON.
What's the problem with JSON? Just which characters it can use?
XML is meant for you to create & embed entire namespaced specification schemas that don’t have very strict limitations. JSON schemas are more ad-hoc than a built in since it isn’t a part of the spec or namespaced & IIRC Matrix uses events all stringly-typed by a message name instead of the XMPP approach which assumes already the message body can/will contain arbitrary data according to a XEP or other spec. I’m non as knowledgeable on the subject as I would like to be tho…
Aside: https://www.balisage.net/Proceedings/vol10/html/Lee01/BalisageVol10-Lee01.html