from Hacker News

Spring 83: a draft protocol intended to suggest new ways of relating online

by SinePost on 4/23/25, 6:08 PM with 21 comments

  • by pavel_lishin on 4/23/25, 6:50 PM

    One of the things I love about RSS and its clients is that I can walk away from my computer for a month, and then catch up (or not! I can mark feeds, folders, or the whole thing as read!) on what I've missed, whether it's from someone posting something once an hour, or something once a year, as the author suggests.

    But with Spring 83, I leave a board, and may come back to a totally different board, knowing nothing of the context of how it got to where it is now. It's the equivalent of AIM status messages!

    That's probably a feature in some people's minds, which is fine, but it's definitely not a feature for me.

  • by nsriv on 4/23/25, 11:36 PM

    I found the narrative explanation of this protocol really beautifully written.

    https://www.robinsloan.com/lab/specifying-spring-83/

  • by pvg on 4/23/25, 6:10 PM

  • by clueless on 4/23/25, 8:22 PM

    > Spring ’83 doesn’t formalize interactions and relationships. The protocol doesn’t provide any mechanism for replies, likes, favorites, or, indeed, feedback of any kind. Publishers are encouraged to use the full flexibility of HTML to develop their own approaches, inviting readers to respond via email, join a live chat, send a postcard … whatever!

    I think this is one of the biggest missing features of this sort of decentralized approach to following/aggregating content. There is so much in the commenting/interaction handling of the current centralized approach that keep people coming back.

  • by redm on 4/23/25, 7:01 PM

    This kind of reminds me of Instagram stories, somewhat ephemeral, the current state of being of people I follow, and things I'm interested in. I guess I like the federated timeline because it's a federated timeline of things I care about.

  • by unquietwiki on 4/23/25, 8:21 PM

    Question: why would I use this, when it seems like it has less functions than https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol) ?

  • by shark_laser on 4/24/25, 3:52 AM

    I love Robin Sloan, but why not just build this on Nostr?

    It can do everything required here and more, and you get immediate community support, and therefore increased adoption, a broad existing list of compatible clients (depending on event kind) and immediate ability to give back real value to those who provided you with content you found valuable.

    His objection to Mastodon is that it is a "timeline" but he doesn't even mention Nostr. There are Libraries, App Stores, Podcasting Apps, Job Boards, Live Streaming services and more built on Nostr. It can be whatever you want it to be.

  • by groby_b on 4/23/25, 11:45 PM

    It's a beautiful goal, but like so many things on the Internet, it wants a social change and hopes to achieve it via a technological solution that rejects most of the things people want from their Internet. And neither nostalgia nor technology will fix social issues.

    If I were to put it in a quip, I'd say "Doesn't support cat pictures, dead".

    If you truly want to fix what's broken about the Internet (and there's so much!) you will need to engage with why it's broken, why those forces shaped it the way they did, and how you will address those forces in your new proposals. You will need to think about why people would want to change their behavior.

    I mean, don't get me wrong - it's still a very cool experiment & art project, from the builder perspective. But like most art projects, it will only reach a small audience.

  • by throwaway290 on 4/25/25, 6:13 AM

    > Each publisher maintains just one board

    And that's where it went wrong...

  • by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF on 4/23/25, 8:48 PM

    Interesting!