I was struggling to wrap my head around how federated social media works until I realized that email has basically been doing the same thing for 30 years. Different email servers are like instances of a federated network. You can send emails to people from within a single server or you can send emails to people on any other mail server. Your email address is a username followed by an ‘@’ and the server address, just like on Lemmy. Email is a decentralized service I’ve been using the whole time!
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?
Not really… Google “bought” it out back in the early 2000s and took over the archives. And turned it into its groups product.
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.
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.
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:
-- --- .-. ... . / -.-. --- -.. . / -... . / .-.. .. - / ..-. .- -- / -. --- / -.-. .- .--.