- cross-posted to:
- memes@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- memes@lemmy.world
It’s funny when armchair experts insist that the fediverse won’t catch on because “federation is too hard to understand” when arguably the most widespread communication system on the internet follows the same model
You must log in or register to comment.
It’s funny when armchair experts insist that the fediverse won’t catch on because “federation is too hard to understand” when arguably the most widespread communication system on the internet follows the same model
Because you don’t need to understand email to use it.
There have been decades of software and user interface advancements that have made the usage of email extremely simple and straightforward.
People also inherently grasp the idea of it because they understand the real world concept of mail.
Email is also one way. You aren’t sending mail to and receiving mail from everyone, or reading mail one person sent to another. You’re just sending something to an address.
Email also doesn’t have any confusion around which mailboxes are allowed to speak to each other.
The fediverse is nowhere near that simple or intuitive.
Particularly Lemmy because Lemmy admins have fundamentally broken the idea of federation with defederation. It generally doesn’t matter what email you use or what email the receiver uses, . It does actually matter what instance you’re on.
It was broken before then, the whole distributed user and instances is hard for the average non techy. This is the same issue Linux has. People say “just install Linux” but when the person Google’s it, they get destroyed with 30 plus flavors and don’t understand what to do.
It does not though. I made a post the other day from the StarTrek.website instance and couldn’t figure out if nobody had upvoted or commented on it, then tried to look it up on my regular discuss.online instance where it didn’t exist, then went further to look it up on Lemmy.world (where the community is located) and saw that tens of people had. I wasn’t able to respond to any of those at first though, until it caught up on an instance where I already had an account (edit: except I could not do that from the StarTrek.website instance where I had made the post from, bc it hadn’t seen the comment yet even the next day - so I had to do it from a third instance involved in all this.)
And that wasn’t even the only time that very same day that I saw a post existing/not existing and/or having a different number of comments and differences in voting counts. Perhaps 0.19.6 will help with some of these issues, at least on Lemmy but then PieFed, Mbin, and eventually Sublinks are still going to have to figure things out on their own as well.
So I am glad that things are going well for you who I note is on Lemmy.world, but the rest of the Fediverse is definitely struggling, in part because rather than in spite of that centralization. Also I note that Lemmy.world federating smoothly within itself doesn’t even count in my book as “federation” at all! That’s just Reddit 2.0 with everything on a single server, with all the benefits and pitfalls which that entails.
More generally when the subject is man vs. bear, and someone chooses bear, it doesn’t help to simply laugh at those making that choice. Maybe we should listen, and maybe even expend efforts to make changes to become more welcoming for more people that would absolutely love to get off of the likes of Reddit, X, Threads, or Facebook?
That’s my 2¢ anyway.
Nobody point how much Email sucks!
just imagine if we could only communicate with people using the same mail service like the newer internet.
This used to be true. However in the internet of today, if your email doesn’t come from a Microsoft or a google it will get rejected if the recipient is a Microsoft or google email address. They have taken over.
You CAN do the full list of things to get accepted there. But you only need to fail a SINGLE test to get sent to junk mail jail.
To not be put to junk you need all of the following (oh and this can and will change one day and you’ll go straight to junk)
- SPF configured
- DKIM configured with valid keys applied to DNS
- DNS secured with DNSSEC, with validated keys passing all minimum requirements
- DMARC configured for domain
- Your mail server NOR the entire network on a DNSRBL. For example right now my mail server is hosted on OVH (moving soon) and it will go to junk, and in the hotmail/outlook headers it makes clear this is the only failure (-0.2 points, enough to go straight to junk mail jail)
Not sure if I missed any there. It’s been a while since I set all this crap up.
You forgot both ‘Don’t send too much email’ and ‘Fail to send enough email’ as qualifiers, as well.
Which I think is the big thing that hits more people than anything else, since ‘too much traffic’ and ‘not enough traffic’ are not defined and so you can easily be caught by one, then the other, then end up in purgatory.
(This is mostly a Microsoft problem rather than a Google problem, but still.)
Also if you’re running an email server for others, it takes very little from single individual, like a small webshop newsletter, which enough people manually marks as junk and you’re on a block list again. Latest one with microsoft took several days to clear, even if all of their tools and 1st tier support claimed that my IP isn’t on a black list.
I’ve jumped all the hoops and done everything by the book, but that still doesn’t mean that any of the big players won’t just screw you up because some of their automaton happens to decide so. That’s why I’m shutting my small ISP business down, there’s no more money to make on that and a ton of customers have moved to the cloud anyways, mostly to microsoft due to their office-suite pricing. It was kind of fun while it lasted, but that ship has sailed.
Yeah, I’m quite sure it’s a deliberate activity to dissuade against private email servers. Keep everyone’s email “in the club”. Once you’ve got this much working you need a whole suite of tools to deal with the HUGE amount of spam you need to filter. It can be a hell of a lot.
Filtering incoming spam, while not 100% correct, is a pretty straightforward thing to do. Use DNSBL and other lists from spamhaus and it takes care of 90+% of the problem. Incoming spam has not been a huge issue for me, but when people try to send mail to someone in M365 cloud or to Gsuite and they just decide that your server isn’t important enough they just block you out and that’s it. Trying to circumvent that takes a ton of time and effort and while it can be done it’s a huge pain in the rear. And trying to fight your way trough the 1st tier support to someone who actually understands the problem and attempts to fix that while you customers are complaining that “problem with email” is actually affecting on their income is the part I’ll happily leave behind.
I’ll set up a couple of new VPS servers to host my personal and friends emails, but if they complain that the service I’m paying from my personal pocket isn’t what they’re after then they’re free to switch into whatever they like. And as infrastructure for that is something like 100€/year I’ll happily pay it by myself so that no one has an option to say ‘I paid for this so you need to fix it’ anymore. On commercial case that’s obviously not an option and I’ve had my share of running a business in a very hostile environment.
This is by design. The primary email relays have been captured for snooping. The spam lists are just a tool to solidify “winners” who comply with giving up your data.
I use proton and simplelogin aliases. Both doing fine
Sure there are a few others. What I’m mainly getting at is that you can’t run an email server in your house the same way you can run a lemmy instance and expect those emails to get delivered. You are forced to use someone else’s email service as a backend or google will flag your emails as spam.
This really underscores that “The Company Town” is very much alive. Also move over East India Trading Co.
We’ve let the Internet too few big players. It used to be more diverse, more federated. Now it’s just the New TV for Advertisers to shit down your neck.
I’m not even sure if we can go back without inventing new technologies not captured by bureaucratic establishments.
If other federated services giant dominance, they will go the same route. And due to the same pressures. (Spam, bad actors, misbehaving servers, etc)
We already see defederation drama.
I think commenter above talking aboht self hosted
Proton used to have some issues but mega corps had to stop since it was illegal
I get the argument, but email is also very different to the kind of open-web network that the fediverse resides in. There are problems the fediverse faces which email doesn’t like discoverability. The emails either come to you or they don’t. With federated social media, you have to find the content you’re looking for first. Maybe you use a search engine, or somebody gives you a business card with their handle and instance, whatever. Then you have to figure out how to view those posts from your home instance if you want to actually interact in any way. There’s browser extensions and stuff which try to make this easier, but that’s another thing that has to be explained and set up, plus not everyone is visiting from a web browser with extension support, or a web browser at all for that matter.
It’s not fundamentally impossible to understand the fediverse, but there’s more of a barrier than email, which can be explained in a single sentence like “Your email provider gives you a unique address that anybody else can send emails to and vice versa.” I don’t think convincing ourselves that the fediverse is actually very simple is going to convince people outside the bubble that that’s true.
convincing ourselves that the fediverse is actually very simple
There’s a difference between ‘technically simple’ and ‘understandable UX’.
Your mom doesn’t need to know how ActivityPub works or the intricacies of federation. She just needs to know to log in and go to c/cutecats.
The early-adopter curse here is causing way too much technobabble to be involved in descriptions that just confuse people, and it’s technical aspects that the nerd cohort here is fascinated by, but uh, nobody else is.
The real leap will be to resist the urge to pull out the PPT and spend 3 hours and 10,000 words explaining how Lemmy works vs the much more concise how-to-use-Lemmy details that people actually want.
There’s a lot of assumptions being made by a lot of people that “normal” people are stupid and couldn’t understand ‘It’s a conversation platform like Reddit, but it’s run by it’s users and that’s why there’s a lot of servers who all talk to each other’ and so there’s a lot of hand wringing about how you have to explain all the details and such, which really, isn’t all that true.
Every non-technical person I’ve explained it to like that immediately understands what it is, how you’d use it, and what it’s used for and I’ll occasionally get a ‘Oh, neat, how does all that work?’ question I can then expand on, but that’s like, maybe 1 out of 20.
TLDR: too many details is not helpful for most people, and nerds loooooove going into more detail than anyone could possibly care about
Perhaps a better analogy would be Usenet, IRC, or XMPP?
There is discoveribility, but no one uses it. It’s called Web of Trust (by PGP).
Link, please?
Doesn’t really have the same purpose but…
Thank you either way.
The point being made is really just the identity of user being tied to User@domain.tld vs @handle it seems like that concept has died with Web 2.0. Only thing I would improve of the fediverse. If communities could be merged with when a group of instances agree to form a network. Like how IRC does it with channels. I mean yeah there would be netsplits from time to time but it would cut down on duplication and increase the traffic of niche communities like the benefits of central platforms get but it’s still distributed.
Well with email if you want emails to come to you you also have to search for it and sign up your email to a list to receive them or give your email to people for them to send you stuff.
In lemmy you need to go to a community finder and find communities you want then you copy their link and paste it in your home instance search bar and hit follow. With email you need to search the web for a sites email list then paste your email in their and say you want to receive their email
i feel like the newsgroups could also be pegged as an early distributed/mass-audience environment similar to what we see today… multiple nodes sharing sometimes identical loads of content
i miss tagline management… bluewave
e. ALso! the star trek nonsense was strong with alt.wesly.crusher.die.die.die!
We’ve got some strong Star Trek nonsense brewing in !tenforward@lemmy.world
Yeah, Usenet was where it was at back at the turn of the millennium. Then again, I had access through a university. Access wasn’t free outside of places like that.
ISPs were spotty on coverage because even at that time, they needed at least a terabyte of storage to dedicate to it, and still not be able to cover everything that was on there. Of course, they might’ve got away with less if they decided not to carry the binaries newsgroups…
The way it worked was a lot like how Fediverse federation works now, or similarly, filesharing. It was possible to be reading a thread of messages and the older ones wouldn’t be available on your local/ISP news server because their space had been recycled for newer data.
If you were lucky, your attempt to access that message might cause your host to grab it on a future request to upstream hosts or peers, but some Usenet messages are completely lost to time because everyone purged them.
Google buying Dejanews, the largest archive of all messages, and merging it with the travesty that was (and still is) Google Groups just about killed the whole thing.
Google buying Dejanews, the largest archive of all messages, and merging it with the travesty that was (and still is) Google Groups just about killed the whole thing.
Well that and the fact that it was unmoderated which eventually led to it being populated almost exclusively with mentally ill troll savants. USENET by the end was the digital equivalent of a horror zoo of abused monkeys slinging shit all over everyone and themselves.
unmoderated
Fun fact: that’s not strictly true.
You could have moderated groups, where a moderator/group of moderators would get sent every post via email, and they’d only be posted into the group if approved.
The vast, vast, vast majority of groups were not moderated, but that’s not to say you couldn’t do so.
pegged
Haha
I don’t care if it catches on, I’m enjoying it here where the people are still awesome.
deleted by creator
Usenet/IRC/BBS sitting in the background like: Am I a joke to you?
IRC was “kinda” federated. You needed to convince a server already in the network to accept your server. But in the early days requirements were quite low.
BBS was not really federated (except Fidonet I guess).
Usenet, I guess it kinda was. But only ISPs were really running NNTP servers. Only they and unis really had the resources to too.
And XMPP (1999).
Oh Jabber the true RCS of the day.
… but lemmy and masto do completely different things
masto’s a microblogging platform like twitter and lemmy is a link aggregator like reddit
honestly i kinda wish there were a rebuild of email that is compatible with the old system but was redesigned from the ground up to do the job better
I’m not technical enough to think it through carefully but I’ve always thought there was an opportunity for an organization like USPS to develop email 2.0 - something that gives people some kind of verifiable and secure email address so that users can easily find each other whilst filtering out spam (or to have spam taken into consideration in the design at the outset). You would design it based on strict standards that would be difficult to get around so that big tech could not easily co-opt it, and adopt for some kind of critical function (taxes, voting maybe?) so that it would encourage adoption en masse. Make it distributed so that users can selfhost it easily, safely, and securely.
Yeah man if I were in charge of the post office I’d definitely push for that AND the return of postal banking. Every post office in the United States would be your one stop service for this email so if there are authentication issues or anything you can actually go there and talk to a PERSON, IN-PERSON.
You would use this system specifically for official government correspondence, and also it’d be better for job seeking too - any situation where you need to be communicating as YOURSELF, fully verified.
I’d even throw in social media features. Forums, microblogging, live chat groups… however, everyone’s identity is clear and certain. No anonymity here. There is privacy insofar as what’s between you and the government stays between you and the government, but if you want anonymity and to express opinions without someone knowing who you are, that’s to be done elsewhere.
Instead of a social media website that lies to you and pretends dishonestly to give you privacy, this would have to be up front about the fact that it’s public property. A town square where you’re wearing a name tag. If you don’t want your neighbors knowing your rhetorical positions, post them elsewhere. Those other places, private services, and important and need to exist as counterbalance.
I’m sure many criminals would be stupid enough to use it for human trafficking and contraband smuggling shit though so that’ll help uncover and discipline rogue elements.
Mastodon is objectively more popular than lemmy. But comparing them to email as a whole is a bit deceptive, a better comparison would be Mastodon and Gmail, or ActivityPub and Email.
This smells like ego projection. These are tools for jobs, they don’t have to compete.
After email comes matrix. If you include all systems based on matrix, there are hundreds of millions of users already.
Mastadon and Lemmy use the same protocol.
You can even see accounts and posts from Mastodon on Lemmy, and the other way around too.
But yes, email is great.
I’ve heard it’s (currently) impossible to post on Mastodon with a Lemmy account due to how both are differently built, unless you’re referring to seeing a Lemmy discussion from Mastodon.
kbin/mbin does have some mastadonesque facilities. So it straddles the line between threadiverse and I dunno what we call the mastadon side.
Mbin will do both but not all servers appear to federate with Mastodon
IIRC, ð USPS actually almost adopted a policy to just give everyone in ð country ðeir own email address once upon a time.
Firstly, that would be awesome, but imagine the spam.
Secondly, I’m a proponent of thorn, I get it. But ð was almost exclusively used medially and terminally in English. In addition it didn’t last nearly as long, and is much less recognizable as a letter in English. Þ was used initially, and is far more commonly seen in English. I get that you’re using them for voiced and unvoiced like in Icelandic, but that wasn’t so much the convention in English. I’m not against it, I’m asking to be sold on it. Lol. Sell me on why I need eth instead of just using thorn for both voiced and unvoiced, please? I’m willing to be converted.
And third, I’m having trouble finding it, was eth on it’s own ever used as a single letter spelling of the, or is that your own addition? I like it. When writing (by hand) notes or things only I’ll be reading, I use the þe shorthand that looks like an e cradled in the crook of a y, like was common in colonial America.
