Ask Lemmy

Networking standards started picking winners during the PC revolution of the 80's and 90's. Ethernet, with the first standards announced in 1983, ended up beating out pretty much other LAN standard at the physical layer (physical plugs, voltages and other ways of indicating signals) and the data link layer (the structure of a MAC address or an Ethernet frame). And this series of standards been improved many times over, with meta standards about how to deal with so many generations of standards through autonegotiation and backwards compatibility.

We generally expect Ethernet to just work, at the highest speeds the hardware is capable of supporting.

I see this one quoted a lot when discussing Lemmy communities migration/consolidation/split.

I don't think it really works that well for forums. Some communities have clearly taken over others (see !onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone vs !196@lemmy.world recently). It's not standards competing, it's people going where the activity happens.

Surprised I haven't seen anyone here mention unicode

There are a lot and in most cases you'll notice when dealing with Americans, who are refusing to do stuff like the rest of the world. The meter and kilogram took over from hundreds of different measurement standards. Most of the world is using the same calendar and writes dates in the same way. Most countries are driving on the same side. Traffic signs are kind of the same worldwide. You can buy screws with the same standard everywhere.

If there are fourteen of them, do they deserve to be called "standards" at all?

Email, as far as im aware there isn't some alternative email standard (messaging services, whatsapp, signal, sms, etc do not count imo as I believe they serve a different purpose than email)

DNS, while there are alternative root servers, they still fundamentally rely on the dns protocol.

TCP/IP, when the internet was first starting, this was not the only standard in use, but now it is (to my knowledge).

I thought about this for longer than I should've for a comment on a random post, but this is all I could think of lol.

edit: grammar

Toilet paper rolls.

Somehow we settled on a pretty good size for toilet rolls, and there never seems to be a compatibility issue with holders.

At least not for households. Commercial products have their own things going on, but it doesn't affect most people.

Is there a formal standard, or did we decide not to mess with good enough?

The way I see it, it's not so much an issue of making something that's better than the other standards. It's really about getting your standard into actual use and hitting critical mass which makes all the other standards irrelevant.

You can avoid the issue when a government just mandates one standard, ideally after consulting with experts on which is the best.
See: USB, SCART, etc.

Light bulb sockets are the same all over. RJ-45 Ethernet, USB-C, Bluetooth, WiFi, TCP, HTTP, HTML, CSS.

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There are many, I think. Like what other people have mentioned, sometimes the new standard is just better on all metrics.

Another common example is when someone creates something as a passion project, rather than expecting it to get used widely. It's especially frustrating for me when I see people denigrate projects like those, criticizing it for a lack of practicality...

MIDI.

Before the 80's, there was no standard interface to control electronic instruments, just a bunch of proprietary interfaces unique to each manufacterer. But in 1983, amazingly they actually standardized on MIDI, and it remains a useful standard to this day, with any new versions of MIDI being completely backwards compatible, so your Yamaha DX7 from the 80's is still just as viable to use today as the day it was new!

Whenever the new standard hits the almost impossible golden triangle of "cheap, reliable, and fast".

It's gotta be cheaper than the alternatives, better and more reliable than the alternatives, and faster/easier to adopt than the alternatives.

Early computers for example had various ways to chug math, such as mechanical setups, relays, vacuum tube's, etc.

When Bell invented their MOSFET transistor and figured out how to scale production, all those previous methods became obsolete for computers because transistors were now cheaper, more reliable, and faster to adopt than their predecessors.

Tbf though transistors are more of a hardware thing. A better example of a standard would be RIP being superceded by BGP on the internet.

what if instead of coming up with new standards to the pile you combine existing ones, based on what works and is reasonable to do?

For home automation, Matter/Thread has the potential. We’ll see over the next five years, but yes market forces can make a new standard work

Reasons I’m hopeful

• this is the first time major companies are involved: Apple, Google, Amazon agree
• first time home automation hubs “just happen”, with the millions of people who have Echo, Google Home, Apple devices
• small companies that dominate home automation seem to realize the problem of the market can’t reasonably expand without interoperability and ease of use

Matter/Thread is the new kid on the block. Will it be yet another home automation standard, or will it gradually replace the previous ones? We’ll see.

USB has worked pretty well IMO