Federated social media from before it was cool : fediverse

[–] originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com 78 points 4 weeks ago (5 children)

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!

[–] wise_pancake@lemmy.ca 21 points 4 weeks ago

We’ve got some strong Star Trek nonsense brewing in !tenforward@lemmy.world

[–] palordrolap@fedia.io 13 points 4 weeks ago (2 children)

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.

[–] Supervisor194@lemmy.world 7 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

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.

[–] schizo@forum.uncomfortable.business 10 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (4 children)

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.

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[–] mlg@lemmy.world 50 points 4 weeks ago (2 children)

Yeah and then google+microsoft rolled in and killed the decentralized nature of email with gmail and outlook.

Only sign left of the good ol days is merged accounts with @ old domain names and the few that self host.

[–] NateNate60@lemmy.world 25 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (3 children)

It's not really like they were evil about it though. Google attracted customers through its huge (at the time) 1 GB email storage space, which at the time, was unbelievably generous and also impressive in that it was offered for free. Outlook (Hotmail at the time) also drew in customers by offering the service for free, anywhere in the world, without needing to sign up for Internet service. Remember, at the time, e-mail was a service that was bundled with your Internet service provider.

Into the mid-2000s and 2010s, the way that Gmail and Outlook kept customers was through bundle deals for enterprise customers and improvements to their webmail offerings. Gmail had (and arguably, still has) one of the best webmail clients available anywhere. Outlook was not far behind, and it was also usually bundled with enterprise Microsoft Office subscriptions, so most companies just decided, "eh, why not". The price (free) and simplicity is difficult to beat. It was at that point that Microsoft Outlook (the mail client, not the e-mail service) was the "gold standard" for desktop mail clients, at least according to middle-aged office workers who barely knew anything about e-mail to begin with. Today, the G-Suite, as it is called, is one of the most popular enterprise software suites, perhaps second only to Microsoft Office. Most people learned how to use e-mail and the Internet in the 2000s and 2010s through school or work.

You have to compare the offerings of Google and Microsoft with their competitors. AOL mail was popular but the Internet service provided by the same company was not. When people quit AOL Internet service, many switched e-mail providers as well, thinking that if they did not maintain their AOL subscription, they would lose access to their mailbox as well.

Google and Microsoft didn't "kill" the decentralised e-mail of yesteryear. They beat it fair and square by offering a superior product. If you're trying to pick an e-mail service today, Gmail and Outlook are still by far the best options in terms of ease of use, free storage, and the quality of their webmail clients. I would even go so far as to say that the Gmail web client was so good that it single-handedly killed the desktop mail client for casual users. I think that today, there are really only three legitimate players left if you're a rational consumer who is self-interested in picking the best e-mail service for yourself: Proton Mail if you care a lot about privacy, and Gmail or Outlook if you don't.

[–] unrelatedkeg@lemmy.sdf.org 20 points 3 weeks ago

Google and Microsoft didn't "kill" the decentralised e-mail of yesteryear. They beat it fair and square

Sure, they might've cornered the market fair and square, but they're certainly doing anticompetitive things in keeping it cornered.

Just try setting up a mail server not connected to any of the big corpos (Google, MS, Cloudflare or their clients with more niche marketing) and see who will actually recieve your mails. You most likely won't land into the Spam folder either.

[–] Flatfire@lemmy.ca 7 points 4 weeks ago

It is also worth considering that yes, MS and Google have definitely dominated the market through superior products, but the standards they've pushed for and established have also made it difficult for other players to enter. If we wanted to say that the federated nature of email is dead, I think that's a fair argument still.

Hosting your own email server is quite difficult. You have to jump through a lot of hoops to land in anyone's mailbox without assistance. If you want to make a mailing list, you basically need to use a mailing service, lest you get blacklisted by major systems owned by MS and Google. Much of this is a byproduct of spam, by which I don't blame Google and MS for doing their best to protect against, but at the same time they have more or less neutered some core aspects of what made email accessible.

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[–] menemen@lemmy.world 8 points 4 weeks ago (2 children)

@yahoo.com is still somewhat popular among us old farts.

[–] Leg@sh.itjust.works 6 points 4 weeks ago

I would be one of you if they didn't purge my accounts years ago. The trust will never return.

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[–] vaguerant@fedia.io 47 points 4 weeks ago (5 children)

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.

[–] schizo@forum.uncomfortable.business 16 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

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

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[–] suzune@ani.social 15 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

There is discoveribility, but no one uses it. It's called Web of Trust (by PGP).

[–] P4ulin_Kbana@lemmy.eco.br 7 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

Link, please?

[–] Hawke@lemmy.world 12 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

Doesn’t really have the same purpose but…

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_trust

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[–] z3rOR0ne@lemmy.ml 6 points 4 weeks ago

Perhaps a better analogy would be Usenet, IRC, or XMPP?

[–] lordnikon@lemmy.world 4 points 4 weeks ago

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.

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[–] doctortran@lemm.ee 45 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (5 children)

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 at once, or reading mail one person sent to another and interjecting. You're just sending something to an address, not CC'ing literally everyone all the time.

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, baring more niche services. It does actually matter what instance you're on.

We try to sell people on this comparison, try to explain to them that it's simple, but it's really a half-truth at best, or a lie at worst.

When you joined reddit, you know for a fact you're seeing everything, and the same thing as everyone else. The same posts, the same comments, the same vote counts. A simple, shared, unfiltered experience of everything was the default, and then you shaped it yourself.

That's not the case with the fediverse. There's no simple default. You have to build it yourself.

[–] Crashumbc@lemmy.world 13 points 4 weeks ago

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.

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[–] wise_pancake@lemmy.ca 43 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

I don’t care if it catches on, I’m enjoying it here where the people are still awesome.

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[–] Wolfram@lemmy.world 26 points 4 weeks ago (2 children)

Federation really isn't hard to understand especially when you dive in and start using it. I don't understand anyone who says otherwise.

Somehow this sentiment exists in the selfhosted subreddit and is why the community didn't move to Lemmy. One of the last places I'd expect to let something kinda technical scare them tbh.

[–] Draconic_NEO@lemmy.world 5 points 4 weeks ago

It's an excuse, people don't want to just say they don't want to do it, so they make an excuse not to, saying it's ""complicated"". They don't feel like it or hate it for some irrational reason, possibly a misconception or just hate change.

If you see someone making excuses like this, or even casually making fun of the idea of decentralization and the fediverse, challenge them on it, point out how they are making excuses simply because they don't want to do it, or say no. Ask them how it is "complicated" and make them give an explanation. 90% of the people I've done this with couldn't come up with one and just acted embarrassed after, because they couldn't come up with one. It's a mindless excuse.

[–] rmuk@feddit.uk 4 points 4 weeks ago

"Federation" is like "non-fungible token". Everyone knows what it is, but they've never heard it called that.

[–] umbrella@lemmy.ml 21 points 4 weeks ago

just imagine if we could only communicate with people using the same mail service like the newer internet.

[–] iconic_admin@lemmy.world 19 points 4 weeks ago (5 children)

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.

[–] r00ty@kbin.life 31 points 4 weeks ago (3 children)

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.

[–] schizo@forum.uncomfortable.business 15 points 4 weeks ago

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.)

[–] IsoKiero@sopuli.xyz 6 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

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.

[–] r00ty@kbin.life 5 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] pineapplelover@lemm.ee 9 points 4 weeks ago (2 children)

I use proton and simplelogin aliases. Both doing fine

[–] iconic_admin@lemmy.world 8 points 4 weeks ago (2 children)

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.

[–] electricprism@lemmy.ml 4 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 15 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago)

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.

[–] Nexy@lemmy.sdf.org 14 points 4 weeks ago (8 children)

I can't believe XMPP is not a standard

[–] corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 9 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

It was.

In fact, for about 3 weeks, Facebook and gtalk could exchange message seamlessly and easily over their fed gateway and xmpp.

Seeing a problem with this, FB changed. With it being at least 4.5 weeks since the last complete redesign incompatible with the old, Google also changed to something that sucked.

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[–] beanlink@lemmy.world 13 points 4 weeks ago (2 children)

Usenet/IRC/BBS sitting in the background like: Am I a joke to you?

[–] r00ty@kbin.life 12 points 4 weeks ago

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.

[–] poVoq@slrpnk.net 10 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

And XMPP (1999).

[–] beanlink@lemmy.world 7 points 4 weeks ago

Oh Jabber the true RCS of the day.

[–] krimsonbun@lemmy.blahaj.zone 12 points 4 weeks ago

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.

[–] Lemmchen@feddit.org 12 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

Nobody is talking about Diaspora anymore ¯\_ (ツ) _/¯

[–] generic_computers@lemmy.zip 6 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (1 children)

I used to run Diaspora* on my home server for a while, thought it was cool. Stopped doing so when I realized no one used it.

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[–] stupidcasey@lemmy.world 11 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

Nobody point how much Email sucks!

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[–] Marx2k@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

IRC has entered the chat

[–] Illecors@lemmy.cafe 8 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

Irc is not federated, though. Servers don't talk to each other

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[–] tehn00bi@lemmy.world 9 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

Usenet?

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[–] Draegur@lemm.ee 8 points 4 weeks ago (2 children)

... 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

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[–] aubeynarf@lemmynsfw.com 5 points 4 weeks ago

Usenet or Fidonet would be a more apt comparison

Fediverse

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