[thesuitonym]

I often wonder if people have forgotten that you can send information through the internet without HTTP(S)

[miohtama]

You can, but every non web protocol would need the user to install a binary. This is gated by Microsoft, Google and Apple today.

[wmf]

If you ever want to implement a protocol in the browser it has to be on top of HTTP, WebSocket, WebRTC, WebTransport, etc.

[embedding-shape]

Since others starting intercepting and eavesdrop on non-authenticated traffic, it got a lot less comfy to do so though. It's not like people are adding encryption to stuff for the fun of it.

[tardedmeme]

I often wonder if people have forgotten that you can use TLS through the internet without HTTP

[riffic]

it seems the parent comment isn't referring directly to encryption / TLS, but building everything on top of HTTP / HTTPS, which seems to be the default abstraction these days to build on top of.

[rapnie]

I agree, it is always HTTP nowadays. The Librecast project [0] is doing interesting R&D around multicast and social networking, and has been / is being funded by multiple NLnet grants over the years. I think they have plans to use ActivityPub to demonstrate their work. Current active project is LibreCast Studio, a collaboration environment. The linked video on the page is a very interesting watch.

[0] https://librecast.net/about.html

[mghackerlady]

it's not impossible to implement encryption elsewhere, gemini pretty famously requires it

[embedding-shape]

Of course not, the context here is ATProto which literally stands for "Authenticated Transfer Protocol", and it uses other protocols than just http/tls, so of course there are other ways :)

[qznc]

I assume for anything else someone will run into firewall/proxy issues.

[thesuitonym]

That's such a non-issue, though. And using HTTP doesn't guarantee you won't run into firewall/proxy issues.

[tptacek]

In addition to the middlebox problem, most (not all, but most) of the things that send information over the Internet that aren't HTTP-shaped (incl. HTTP/2 and HTTP/3) are worse than the best HTTP-shaped things. This makes sense: HTTP-shaped things are where all the energy is directed.