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Christina Warren

Actively pushing against others to adopt your protocol is how you ensure that your protocol won't "win." I'm a firm believer that a decentralized protocol will be the future of social networks/feeds as we know them. I don't know if it is going to be or or something else. But I believe a decentralized protocol will be the future. But the winner will be the one that centralized-acting services adopt. That's a good thing for everyone. It means users have data portability. 🧵

But I'll tell you right now who will not win: the protocol and community that wants to make it as difficult as possible for people to adopt/build-off of and interoperate with. Ogg Vorbis, Opus, and Theora tried to do the whole "open" standard audio and video codec thing. It was bad quality and hard to implement, but “open.” Everyone smart used MP3 anyway. And eventually, MP3 became patent free. Even smarter people started working on things like VP8 and VP9 and HEVC and eventually we have AV1

And AV1 is still in-progress, but it has major adoption from almost everyone *and* is royalty free. It has succeed in all the areas Theora has failed. It's really easy to be so insular and dogmatic that you become Theora. Meanwhile, actual good innovation that can benefit everyone (and yes, that does mean for-profit companies) is what changes the world

@film_girl Truly open web standards were what allowed us to loosen Microsoft’s grip on web browsers. It’s remarkable how IE adopted standards, other browsers were able to break in, and now IE is a distant memory. If folks had tried to reject MS’s adoption of web standards, this would look very different.

@film_girl Still very new to the fediverse, and I always avoided any details of technical details of protocols at work but I think you are exactly on point.

Protocols flow to the path of least resistance. I wish I could explain the benefits of open protocols to my normal friends. Portability is a good example here.

@film_girl Great thread, just based on what you mention: it will be decisive for the overlapping of any protocol, vital for it to dominate, otherwise it will be reduced to just a handful of geeks, just like an elite.

@film_girl yep, anything successful means nearly everyone (the exceptions being the ones that don't follow/moderate to established community standards). That has to include corps and governments (like the EU is moving towards) and even reporters. But it doesn't mean including, as Gab found out, Gab.
Tbh I think so far as I understand AP the biggest challenge is going to be server resources on existing instances, which will mean donations from those that are able.

@film_girl apologies if I'm missing your point/if a million other people have said this that I've just not seen, but I feel like Theora is the only one of those three that hasn't had widespread use? Not so much as an end user format, but Vorbis was both higher quality and free compared with MP3 so had a lot of use with, e.g., games and Spotify, and Opus is widely used for VOIP?

@turmoni So I was speaking of direct to consumer support (and also web-browser support) more than being used invisibly behind the scenes in Spotify or in a VOIP client. It's a good point, but that still doesn't mean I can play an Opus, Theora or even Vorbis file in a standard media player on my phone or desktop out of the box.Even if I have Spotify installed.

@film_girl@mastodon.social @turmoni@social.treehouse.systems have you even fucking tried? It's literally been supported by both IOS and Android for fucking eternity now. Pretty much every Media Player on your phone is guaranteed to be able to play an opus file without any issues whatsoever. It's been built into both Chrome and Firefox for eternity they can both play it without issues. Just about any desktop media player should be able to play it as well other than perhaps the windows default media player that literally nobody uses. Please for the love of God attempt to rub some brain cells together before you type a message

@film_girl yeah, general commercial support was a big issue - I had all my music also transcoded to MP3 (and later AAC when I got an iPod) because very few devices knew what to do with Vorbis. I do now happily have all my music as Opus (and therefore tiny!) on my phone, since I think it's been baked in to Android for a good few years now, with Vorbis having been there for a lot longer, but I can't speak to anything but Android or desktop Linux.

(The only thing Theora had going for it compared with other available formats was its lack of patents, so I never really used that, whereas Vorbis and Opus are legitimately good compared with the competition)

@film_girl

well put. great example.

the OSS community… always obsessed with dogmatic purity tests that end up alienating allies.

@ethanschoonover @film_girl I don’t think it’s dogma *per se* in this particular scenario. i think it’s an unqittingly narrow view of both “open-ness” and “easiness”

@ethanschoonover @film_girl legally unincumbered software eliminates a significant and important barrier to use *for developers building or modifying code*. But there are lots of other barriers (performance, core capabilities, technical complexity, etc) that can stack up to make “open” functionally identical to “closed”. Open is one particular kind of easy, and easy is one particular kind of open.

@film_girl is it possible to type or say “Ogg Vorbis” with a straight face? Autocorrect won’t even let me type it 😜

@film_girl Opus & Vorbis "were" "bad quality?" Opus has completely taken over for anything real time - Discord & *many* communication apps have adopted Opus. Vorbis is used by Spotify. I don't know who "everyone smart" is, maybe I'm just an idiot

AV1 is winning largely because it is Google's baby. Development of the reference encoder isn't "open" at all, and their monopolistic influence has caused problems for competing codecs (like JXL for images, which is superior to AVIF) because of Chromium

@film_girl@mastodon.social this is probably one of the most brain-dead idiotic takes I've ever seen. Which explains why you're a tech podcaster. Opus is literally the industry standard for real time voip and streaming. It's used by every chat application in existence for voice, it's YouTube's first choice for audio if the client device supports it which they all do now. It's also been shown to destroy just about every other codec out there in metrics at almost any bitrate.

It's also probably one of the easiest to implement especially for voice chat applications. Did you even attempt to do even the smallest amount of research before opening the tab to this comment?

@film_girl AV1 is technically VP10 (even on Windows SDK there's some mention of it). I wouldn't say AV1 has won though. Apple still doesn't provide hardware decoding and without hardware encoding it's not practical for most people either.

@robUx4 no, you’re correct. Obviously AVC and HEVC are the clear winners, even beyond VP9. But as a royalty free solution, it’s going to be AV1, not Daala or Theora or anything else that doesn’t have the backing of the people that actually do the work and have the users.

@film_girl @robUx4 How are you defining “winner?” HEVC has had zero penetration outside the Apple ecosystem, & essentially doesn’t exist on the Web. And AV1 is very much not VP10 - it is built off Daala as well as technologies proposed for VP10. That’s like saying “Opus is essentially CELT, SILK sucks.” I get the point you’re trying to make, but these codec comparisons are wholly uninformed & off base.

@film_girl Did not see that comparison coming! I don’t think the Theora people were nearly as dogmatic and stupid as the people pushing against Big Tech on the Fediverse.

@nmn You’re probably right and I regret the analogy now b/c my mentions are full of very angry Ogg fans (who knew!) but I still stand by the overall point!

@film_girl @nmn Yeah, it was unfortunately a very weak analogy because it was almost entirely incorrect. I don’t even hate your initial point, but as someone who actually understands multimedia codec technology, you ruined your message.

@film_girl All three protocols you mentioned were developed after mp3 existed as alternatives that people could use without the licensing cartel - and I don’t think implementation difficulty was the problem at all (they are OSS), or even quality.

Mp3 remained used by pure market inertia dynamics.

@Migueldeicaza @film_girl inertia aside, patent worries were, to my knowledge, one of the reasons Apple never adopted Ogg

@chucker @Migueldeicaza @film_girl This. Given the patent history related to mp3, the chances of an independent audio code not infringing on any patents is slim. And which big company is going to take the risk of losing a multimillion dollar patent lawsuit.

It's safer to stick to formats covered by the mp3 patent pool

@larryosterman @chucker @film_girl so far they don’t infringe.

The real issue is “why bother if we already have licensed a solution that has 99.99% market share”?

@larryosterman @chucker @film_girl you can see these dynamics at play right now over media and image codecs.

I had to license and negotiate assorted codec licenses in the Linux desktop era (remember my Moonlight silverlight reimplementation?)

@Migueldeicaza @larryosterman @chucker @film_girl Now there's a couple of names I've not heard in a very long while. Silverlight was so cool.

@Pwnallthethings @Migueldeicaza @larryosterman @film_girl portions of the Silverlight on Mac work became a precursor for the Mac .NET Core runtime (years later), I believe

@chucker @Pwnallthethings @Migueldeicaza @larryosterman @film_girl Not just for the Mac. Project K (which eventually became .NET Core) started with bits from Silverlight on Windows. In fact the `netcore` TFM meant "Silverlight" (specifically for Win8/WP8), which is why .NET Core ended up using `netcoreapp`.

@Pwnallthethings @Migueldeicaza @larryosterman @chucker @film_girl I had to install it on 3 computers at a client last week, because one of their vendors has a B2B portal that requires it. Of course that also required setting up IE mode in Edge.

@Migueldeicaza @larryosterman @chucker oh, Moonlight! I loved that. Silverlight/WPF had some interesting things from what I remember (which isn’t much). I was invited to a two day Microsoft training thing on Silverlight/WPF in 2009 and I showed up with a MacBook and was using Parallels to use it and the Microsoft trainer like made fun of me for being a Mac user. Meanwhile, I got Visual Studio to work and half the class didn’t so, apple hardware: 1, Dell: 0

@Migueldeicaza @larryosterman @chucker in a pre-HTML5 world, codec bundles stuff was so much more complex that Hulu and Netflix had to use Silverlight for DRM

@film_girl @Migueldeicaza @larryosterman “yeah we wanted to play streaming video in a browser”
— “sure”
— “…so we used a portable .NET runtime packaged as a Netscape plug-in and used that to play Windows Media Vi—“
— “what”

@film_girl @Migueldeicaza @larryosterman I write WPF in a VM on an ARM MBP in 2023 😀

A colleague also bought a Dell and then needed a Mac to publish Flutter apps, and ended up preferring the Mac so much that he now uses that for his .NET stuff

@film_girl (not that Dell hardware is bad. But aside from the Butterfly Keyboard era, Mac laptops are really good. Who knew?)

@film_girl I worked in an all-Windows coding shop. I brought my personal MacBook Pro to a meeting once, so I could refer to some PDFs, and my anti-Apple manager really got onto me. "You've got a lot of guts bringing that in here!"

He uses a Mac now.

@larryosterman @chucker @Migueldeicaza @film_girl

History time!

fun fact 1: those of us who traded in lossless (deadhead tapers) refused to use mp3 and any proprietary format in favor of old fashioned wav or flac. There's an entire sleeve of disc's somewhere in my garage full of them.

Also fun fact 2 from my time at rollingstone dot com in 96-98: all their content was ripped onto .wma files coz it was faster than RealPlayer, higher bit rate so better sound, smaller files than mp3, and universally available on every windows machine running Netscape at the time... Also was how we traced what files were being shared on Napster, Coz wma files had a unique signature tied to it's source.

Those were days...

@eljefedsecurit @larryosterman @Migueldeicaza @film_girl that reminds me of QuickTime 4 with its bizarre UI that included a volume dial nobody understood (it looks like you’d operate it in a circular way, but you were supposed to drag vertically) and a channels list which made teenage me wonder why The Rolling Stones would produce content for Apple in the 1990s

@chucker @eljefedsecurit @larryosterman @Migueldeicaza I loved this UI! This is always QuickTime to me. Even tho QuickTime Pro 7 or whatever was the one I used until the bitter end.

@film_girl That isn't quite right. Vorbis and Opus weren't bad quality (though the packet interlace stuff in Ogg was mistaken), but what scuppered them was bigco's with submarine patents. I tried to get QuickTime to ship Vorbis support and was told by our VP that Dolby and Fraunhofer would start patent litigation if we did.
Similarly Apple fucked up by patenting part of the QuickTime Movie file format and threatened lawsuits, so other players dropped support.

@sandofsky oof. They were so busy being mad about TiVo they completely missed the cloud revolution coming until they could try the even more unpopular AGPL.

@film_girl And alienated the world’s largest tech company, to the point they dropped bash for zsh.

@zippy1981 @sandofsky yup. Apple couldn’t go to the latest version b/c it was GPL so they had to go to zsh which is MIT-licensed.

@zippy1981 @sandofsky and Apple probably could have found a way to bundle bash or make it a shim that would then download at a certain prompt or something, but their lawyers clearly advised them it wasn’t worth the effort. And most users who needed a newer shell were already using homebrew or macports but yeah, it’s what finally made them go to zsh.

@zippy1981 @sandofsky I will say that for a lot of people that choose GPL v3, the friction it creates for other entities is a feature, not a bug. But it also leads to lower adoption of things with that license by people who aren’t ideologically tied to the FSF’s philosophy.

@sandofsky @film_girl I'm not sure open source that’s a one way street is better. We end up with stuff like heartbleed. We simply expects a tiny team or one person to basically keep all our infra going. It's not the worst idea in the world to expect something in return. I personally think dual licensing & those who can pay should pay is better than the GPL strategy. However, the idea that the world's largest software company should get something fundamental to their OS for free feels wrong.

@fds @sandofsky to be clear, most large software companies don’t get fundamental parts of their OS for free. They contribute to the core of many projects, they hire engineers and designers and security people to work on stuff. Large companies can do better, always, but Heartbleed and Log4j didn’t happen because of what license they used. It happened for a host of a reasons but a license change to GPLv3 wouldn’t have prevented it.

@film_girl @sandofsky A change of license would mean they wouldn't have used it, may do it themselves & take ownership of it.

I've never worked for Apple but all companies I've worked for that claim to contribute to open source do the bare minimum & there's usually a fight involved to spend any time on that.

I think it would be healthier overall if devs were better at asking for compensation for their work. Then hire people to help maintain the code vs hoping companies are charitable.

@film_girl @sandofsky The companies I've worked for that are also more likely to have been in violation of software licenses have been software companies.

I don't think think conversation around activity pub growth is healthy but I understand the distrust of silicon valley companies that are just looking to get rich.

I assume activity pub wont' grow but betting on a protocol by one start-up is doomed to fail too, imo.

@film_girl curious about your perspective on why centralized-acting services are what it takes for a protocol to win. (i agree with you, for the record, but look forward to your take)

@austinha because to paraphrase Jim Barksdale, there are only two business models, centralizing and decentralizing. But honestly, b/c you need to cut the friction to get people to use these thing and it is going to be natural for one or two servers to become defacto dominant places. It's similar to email, right? It is open standards but most people use a hosted option from a small number of webhosts. But that doesn' t mean you can't still benefit from IMAP and SMTP if you roll your own

@film_girl so, by this token, Mastodon doesn’t fit the “centralized-acting” model, right?

@austinha Mastodon, no. Now, you could have Mastodon instances that theoretically become “centralized-acting" and then adopt their own features or flags. Mastodon.social really isn't that as much as its detractors try to pretend otherwise (it is much more of a vanilla or reference-implementation IMHO), but something like Medium or Mozilla's instances *could* be. If/when Tumblr gains ActivityPub support, I think that will be centralized-acting -- even tho it won't be on Mastodon necessarily

@film_girl ok, this helps a lot 🙏 maybe it’s more about being centralized-*feeling*, then? like, the current refrain is that UX is the biggest problem in the federated social.

@austinha right, centralized by default. So you don't have to know/care that it is decentralized. That's a nice bonus, but it isn't necessary to know or care.

@film_girl Re centralized-acting services adopting decentralized protocol: See GitHub.