What are some exceptions to the standards problem?

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

TCP/IP isnt the only standard in use even today. UDP/IP is the other big one and there's a few smaller protocols hanging around like utp.
- Ah, I shouldve been more clear. I didnt just mean tcp specifically, I meant IP as a whole, for an example of a competing standard see x.25.
  
  Funny enough, that wikipedia article mentions that x.25 is still in use by the aviation industry, and after a quick search it seems it is! So I guess Im still wrong lol.
- TCP/IP is not the same as TCP, and UDP/IP doesn't exist
- We also have I2P now.

USB has worked pretty well IMO

Yeah just don’t pay too close attention to the unofficial power delivery protocols.
- or the cursed double ended USB-A cables
My main complaint about USB is the cables. There’s no way of knowing what standards and data speeds the cable may support.
- They've now, at least, released a standard set of markings. Basically, the data speed in Gb and the power capacity in Watts will be printed on the connector. Whether chinese suppliers will bother complying is another matter.
"looks inside" meme with the "oh. oh no" meme spliced onto the end
USB , mini USB, type C USB, iphone bs, do those not count?
- Not compared to what we had before usb
  
  It used to be 100% proprietary for everything
- USB-C is the latest standard. Try buying a phone, mouse or headphones swith mini USB these days.

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?

We've got a 100 year old toilet roll holder, the spindle was turned on a lathe and the wooden cutout it sits in was hand carved. It is a poor fit for modern high sheet count rolls. We can't stand to get rid of it so we just leave the roll outside of it until it is small enough to fit.
- I have a half-bath with a modern holder. When that roll is 75% consumed, I move it to the bathrooms with the older style.
- I like how you roll.
- When one roll is empty, have you considered rolling half of a new roll onto it?
- What's the width like? Consistent with modern rolls, or no?
- You're a machinist! Can't you just like....make a better one? /s
This is a cool one I haven't thought of before!

1000006617

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...

The competing standards problem is mostly a problem of not actually talking to stakeholders. Most of these "universal standards" don't cover some rare, specific, but very important, use cases.

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.

see also: NACS (yep that's a Tesla plug in a standards agreement)
Yeah. No standard covers all use cases. It's just best to have one standard that makes a lot of compromises.

When the standard is a big interoperability push that leverages MORE functionality as a bribe to be implemented.

This is how USB (plug & play!), Bluetooth (wireless headset!), HDMI (high def, single cable!) , and USB-C (both sides are good!) all beat the entrenched pseudo standards.

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.

A lot of people seem to be opposed to this argument, seeing it as a kind of government overreach, but I think it can work if done correctly. Things like USB and HDMI are already governed by collectives of companies, I think having the government work together with them can be beneficial for both consumers and producers alike.
- obligatory DisplayPort > HDMI
- Sometimes the regulators sit back and see how the market is pushing, then regulate it to reduce waste. EV chargers for example.
USB-C is a total failure though. Switching voltages, extremely high currents, expensive cables, fickle connectors, ...
- non standard conforming cables, and connectors, plus the entire mess of it supporting anything from power only, to usb 2, to usb 3, to thunderbolt 3, to thunderbolt 4? and usb 4.0 now.
  
  It's an utter fucking disaster of a shithole.

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!

DMX is a similar protocol for lighting.
Sure, there's artnet and sacn, but most gigs still use good old DMX.
- I hate to tell you this but DMX passed away in 2021
This really is a perfect example. I did a lot of MIDI things as a kid!
Should mention Open Sound Control which is also pretty good. Not exactly a competitor, it was supposed to provide a richer, real time interface. Still popular for certain use cases, including beyond music.

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.

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.

another big example is the telecom companies being superseded by IP based networking, rather than whatever patch routing bullshit was previously cooked up.

Sometimes certain solutions are just, better.

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

While light bulb sockets don't change much from region to region, they definitely aren't all the same. For the bulbs (not the bars), there's two large categories: Edison screws and bi-pin. Edison screws also come in a lot of sizes. When compact fluorescents were rolling out, they got a new bi-pin connector from the USA: GU24. My whole home has GU24 fixtures (not by my own choice), but my lamps are Edison screws.
- GU24 is wack, especially for home lighting. I think they aren't made much anymore.
- Thank you for teaching me how to replace my porch light (ONLY MY PORCH LIGHT?!?!) that's been out for over a year. I tried to pull the bulb out and it shattered in my hands. I was like WTF is this shit? Haven't touched it since.
Include car cigarette lighter power ports
It seems a lot of sites these days are actively hostile towards the HTML-CSS combo.
- What do you mean? Do you have any examples?
HTML CSS and JavaScript each having different syntax is stupid and I will die on that hill.
- Just use React or something, you can use a single syntax for all three. It makes total sense why the syntax is different if you think about when and why they were made. We had HTML for years before CSS, and it was longer still until we got JavaScript. Each language has a different purpose, so naturally a different syntax makes sense. Your hill is poorly defended.

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.

networking standards were a mess before ethernet really fucking cooked with twisted pair wiring.

Ethernet had already existed for a little bit prior to this, and most other alternatives were actively being worked on at the time, and relatively similar to ethernet, save for the general technical implementation, token ring as opposed to the funny broadcast meta. But when ethernet was able to just barely get ahead and use twisted pair, the entire thing came crumbling down and everyone agreed that ethernet over twisted pair, with switched star topology was the best.
- What'd twisted pair bring to the table? Noise reduction?

Not exactly this, but it reminds me of my first job. I used to work in finance, and I was given the task of automating cash flow reports that were sent out to hundreds of clients.

The problem was that they were made manually in Excel, and most of them were unique. So every couple years they'd get a bunch of smart people in a conference room, and tell them to figure out how to automate the cash flows. The first step was always to create a standard cash flow template, and convince everyone to adopt it.

Some users would adopt the new template, but most of them would say that the client didn't like it, so they'd stop using it and the project would fall apart.

By the time I got there, there were still hundreds of unique cash flows, but then there were a few dozen that shared the same handful of templates, like a graveyard of failed attempts to automate this process.

I just made the output customizable. The reports looked the same as what the client was used to, but it saved hundreds of man hours for the users. A lot of people got laid off.

UEFI boot mode

Anything by Sony

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.

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.

Chess, there's so many wonderful ways to play.

Also, playing cards. Every casino and basement house party uses the same 52 card deck. It's sold in airports all over the world.

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.

My guess is that the speed with which new device types are supported is too slow to make it truly revolutionary. It was a good idea, it just does not happen fast enough to become dominant.
- Definitely a problem - but the positive side of that is the slow pace is from reaching a consensus. It’s easy to be impatient with how slow the rollout is going but if that means that most manufacturers of each type are on board it could still be a good thing
Matter/Thread

i still think IP based smart home kit is a mistake. The internet is already such a big vuln, we don't need a shit ton of garbage sitting on the network only making it more vulnerable.

communication standards like zwave, and zigbee, are preferable here. It looks like at least one of those supports it, but perhaps both will be protocol agnostic.
- Think of Thread as Zigbee with an IPv6 stack. It’s a local communication standard but with a compatible protocol.
  
  I was excited that my current phone has a Thread radio so it can be on the local network for presence and control. Unfortunately not supported yet.
  
  I’m definitely worried about the recent Matter standard for internet access. They say it’s optional, but that capability is easily hijacked by unscrupulous vendors.
  
  my thermostat has cloud functionality that I want, so I’m fine with the option of giving them internet access
  
  my air purifier requires internet access to report back to a vendor-specific portal filled with advertising. I’m not ok with that tradeoff so don’t use any smart functionality.
The only place I have seen thread mentioned before was this blog post: https://overengineer.dev/blog/2024/05/10/thread/

emacs is everything

Except fast.
- It just needs a good text editor, is all.
- Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping
  
  Fortunately I have added a few dozen gigabytes of RAM since that aphorism was popular, and today emacs barely ever swaps very much when I don't deserve it

!iso8601@lemmy.sdf.org

Surprised I haven't seen anyone here mention unicode

Probably because utf-8 vs utf-16 vs utf-32 makes people feel like it is still annoying multi-standard.

Small net protocols like Gemini, gopher, spartan, IPFS because they don't compete with the web instead they coexist as separate things.

Systemd

I'd argue systemd is the opposite. It was so controversial that it made a bunch of init systems appear when before you had just good old sysV.
You monster!

Standards committees: We don't discriminate. Everyone can have their own standard.

I was surprised to find that there are a ton of symbols that have sought to become the standard notation of sarcasm in text. I think we should really adopt one of those that are far more elegant than the "/s." /s Looks ugly as fuck.

i like /s
- I'm going to assume that is sarcastic.
We just need a cartoonified "/s", as an emoji
Is no one going to mention SpOnGeBoB CaPs?
- That's not usually used for sarcasm, but to inflect a mocking tone.
  
  "iS nO oNe GoInG tO mEnTiOn..."
how about this:

note

i'm being sarcastic
look at a physical keyboard and show me any of those symbols.

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

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?

...that would create a new standard.
- yes, but the point is to make something that might actually become new standard instead of making the problem worse. I think the problem is that everyone wants to make something that is great for them and hopes others will just willingly or unwillingly use it.