I was explaining it to a friend today, and I came to the conclusion that Lemmy is a LOT like the old FIDOnet message network that was used on BBS's.
this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2023
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Unfortunately, what email has also shown is that platforms can develop much faster than protocols. I hope all works out for lemmy in the end, but it will be interesting.
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Kinda, sorta.... not really. Eh
On email nothing really "federates". A message is sent to user@server.com and that's the extent of it.
And what do you think AP does?
Well yes, if you simplify pretty much everything online enough it becomes "send message to this address".
With email, that's pretty much it.
With ActivityPub, after being received that message gets federated out to all servers that have a subscriber of whatever service the message was sent to.
The difference is more about implementation, conceptually. Email is just far more one-on-one
I mean, I wouldn't even really agree that Email is far more one-on-one.
Email newsletters and mailing lists are relatively known and are essentially one-to-many as well. If you think about with this angle, a post on a community is not very different from a post in a mailing list.
The main "benefit" to people for these communities vs mailing lists is online archives for later searching. Depending on how things go, I can certainly also entertain wanting Mailing lists back.
What about usenet?
Good point. Can we all go back to it?
I predict that’s exactly what generation alpha is going to do. Gen Z is already using y2k camcorders as cameras. It’s gonna be a trend.
Generation Beta: `--
.-. ... . / -.-.
-.. . / -... . / .-.. .. - / ..-. .- -- / -.
/ -.-. .- .--.`
Not really.. Google "bought" it out back in the early 2000s and took over the archives. And turned it into its groups product.
This is... either simplified to be confusing or a big misunderstanding of kind of everything. Google bought DejaNews an online Usenet text archive. Usenet still exists right now, and there are still at least 5 or more major Usenet server providers you could sign up with today, but most charge for access.
Google bought the company Deja and got their software, which turned into Google groups, and also got their Usenet archive.
They didn't buy Usenet itself (which would be like buying "email"), and it is still very much alive, but it has changed, and most people have moved their preferred place to have discussions elsewhere.
Note: I was going to say "would be like buying a cloud", but Google Cloud is a thing, so...yeah.
I was relying heavily on the quotes around "bought". A large amount of Usenet had consolidated under Deja which went to Google. While there is still some remnants around. What it was before is no where near the same as it is now.
Surprisingly I've heard that the email analogy is not very useful for explaining federation. But I guess not that surprising with people <=18. They've probably never even had an email address outside of school provisions or whatever.
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This is exactly the analogy I use even trying to explain fediverse to normies.
Email is my go-to example when explaining fedi to unfamiliar people. Its especially accessible to non-technical users because almost everyone has sent an email to someone with a different provider.
Wow, this makes a ton of sense and I had never thought about it. Thanks for the example!
Its a reasonable analogy, but were not there yet. While mastodon instances will talk to mastodon instances, and pixelfed instances will talk to pixelfed instances, and kbin instances will talk to kbin instances, at the moment the intercommunication between apps is a real issue. Imagine postfix wouldn't reliably talk to exchange servers, that would be a real barrier to adoption. I'm hopeful this will get sorted, but were on the bleeding edge at the moment.
What do you mean? I can talk to mastodon, kbin, pixelfed, peertube, etc users from inside lemmy and same with my mastodon
This is 1. not true, as shortwavesurfer says and 2. not an equivalent comparison. This would be like saying that mastodon doesn't talk to glitch or pleroma. But it does, so even if this comparison was equivalent, it'd be false.
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Exactly! I think someone else on another thread when trying to explain the fediverse to someone used how e-mail works as a comparison and it just made it click and make sense for me! It's going to be my go-to way to explain it to someone now.
Does each lemmy server need to constantly pull and store all activity from all other instances? That'd be the huge difference here, but I'm not sure how the linking works exactly. Imagine your tiny email server having to sync with all activity on gmail...
The details don't match but the overall architecture is similar. Obviously since email is just messaging between two parties you don't have to download anything, the server just waits until a message comes in.
It’s a good analogy for how accounts are created, but the analogy breaks down when considering what happens when you send an email. When you send an email, you send it to specific people on specific domains. With the Fediverse, you post it to your domain, and anyone who wants to take a look, can.
It's not so much of an analogy, email actually is a federated technology just like ActivityPub is and ActivityPub works a lot like email and has audience targeting fields which map onto the same audience targeting fields that email has (to, cc, etc.) these activities aren't always publicly available, although they can be and they are delivered to another users inbox (although if public they can be read from a user's outbox).
While your analogy isn't bad, the problem is, that email isn't really decentralised/federated anymore.
It's impossible to day to setup your own mailserver and have the email accepted by the major email providers (where most of the people are)!
Checkout this article: https://cfenollosa.com/blog/after-self-hosting-my-email-for-twenty-three-years-i-have-thrown-in-the-towel-the-oligopoly-has-won.html
It's sad, but while email is decentralised in it's core protocol, it's execution has become too centralised today. Fortunately, HTML and the web standards are better as we at least still have Firefox (a non-chromium BLINK engine based browser) today. But even there, chrome takes up too much of the market share.
Doesn’t prevent me from doing it.
I send a mail to you and your shitty mail provider blocks it as spam, even though I setup my SPF and DKIM entries correctly? Well that’s your problem, complain to your provider then lmao.
Of course that cannot be applicable to every use case. Sometimes you need a mail to go through in which case I still use GMail or iCloud Mail, unfortunately.
But it became like that because we let it become like that. We should use email as it was intended to be used, and if it doesn’t work, well fuck it. It’s the recipient’s fault for choosing a shitty or “non-compliant” provider.
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Telegraph has entered the chat.
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