It’s 2024, h264 runs on a CPU like nothing, why haven’t we figured out how to do these things yet?

It’s not about the hardware. (Not like it’s that ubiquitous anyway; I’m daily driving a machine from 2017)

I’m going to guess part of it is because for the things that matter to the people who do end up having to code, test and distribute stuff, something like “seamless screen sharing” or “video conference” doesnt really matter.

And IMO, that’s good if we want to Recover the Web.

The idea behind being in something like a jabber chatroom, or a web forum, is that I can pay attention to 12 channels (or whatever) at a time, read one or two, reply in three others, etc. Text is so un-invasive that I can just explore without bothering myself or anyone else.

In comparison, something like audio chat or video chat is more presence-encompassing. You can’t really “push to talk” three different things to three chatrooms at about once, and you likely can but won’t want to listen to three chatrooms full of people at the same time. For something like a videoconference you not only need a camera, but a good behind-you because not only who knows who or what will be showing back there.

In the end, something like a simple jabber-like chatroom is far easier and more productive to work on, even before we get to the coding part.

Not to mention: this is computer stuff. No one really likes to work on “debt”, which is what “Foo has to have ‘screen sharing’ because Discord has it” ultimately boils down to.