Fediverse is ActivityPub. Email is not, though the theory is somewhat similar.
this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2024
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Fediverse is ActivityPub
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse
According to Wikipedia, ActivityPub is the "most widely used" protocol, but not the "only" protocol. Still not sure if email would qualify though.
The others listed are bluesky, nostra and farcast. I suppose we could count protocols that nobody uses…
They literally use email as an example in the wiki page, lol
The mention of email is
Even so, much like how users of one email service such as Gmail can still send emails to users of another service such as Outlook, users may still view content and interact with users on any other instance in the fediverse
which implicitly says email is not considered part of the fediverse by comparing the two.
It seems like reading comprehension is not what it used to be.
"Much like" == "very similar too" AKA, "close, but no cigar"
You wouldn't compare something to the same something, that's kind of the point of comparisons.
that’s not what the quoted text says at all… let’s rephrase this:
much like how users of one lemmy service such as lemmy.world can still reply to users of another service such as kbin.social, users may still view content and interact with users on any other instance in bluesky
this doesn’t say that lemmy/kbin isn’t part of the fediverse. it takes no position on that fact, merely saying that the things conceptually work in a similar manner
Your rephrasing changed it qualitatively. Of course it takes no position on whether Lemmy is part of the Fediverse considering it now does not have the word Fediverse in it.
Is the "fediverse" some sort of secret club that I'm unaware of or something?
The whole idea of the "fediverse" is that some aspect of it is cross-company, and federated across instances. Email fits that term exactly. The wiki entry doesn't exclude email via the comparison, if anything it makes more of an argument that email is one of the first federated services to exist. The "fediverse" is just the collection of those federated services.
You can call it whatever you want. Email has been around since the 70s. Bluesky and ActivityPub sure have not.
fair enough, i wonder if there are lessons to learn from email that can help the fediverse
Well for one, email is inherently insecure, so not sure if the fediverse can learn from that. It’s already not private.
It's not inherently insecure. There are secure email services but all parties have to be using it.
Exactly, that was my point. Email as it is, is insecure, because you can’t encrypt it and make it work universally unless everyone else does.
Exactly, that was my point. That means it is not inherently insecure.
English isn’t my first language so I might be using “inherently” incorrectly, but I thought it means:
in a way that exists as a natural or basic part of something
So in its basic and natural form, email is not secure. It wasn’t designed as such. Full E2E encryption was only implemented recently by certain providers within their own domains, and won’t work across the board unless all of them cooperate, which won’t happen.
"Inherently" means essentially "no matter how you do it". If you use an encrypted email provider to send a message to another user on another encrypted email provider, it's perfectly secure. Ergo, it's not "inherent".
Full E2E encryption was only implemented recently by certain providers within their own domains
It definitely works across domains. All you have to do is point your domain at your preferred secure email provider.
and won’t work across the board
It doesn't need to.
@jimmy90 @zeppo For sure. One major lesson off the top of my head is with ActivityPub is how errors are presented. I’ve written software to fiddle around with ActivityPub and found servers have terrible - if any - error messages. SMTP provides a bunch of standardised status codes that servers can give back to you, along with diagnostic info. In theory this is possible with apub but in practice it is not addressed at all.
From my perspective mails are federated. If I want to explain federation as a concept to someone I always use mail as an example because everyone can write to everyone independent of the provider, you can selfhost it easily, you could move from one company to another (if you use your own domain), protocols are all FOSS.
So at least it's an open and distributed system. What would be missing for it to count as federated?
I think Usenet would be closer to the Fediverse than the email
Depends how you look at it! Here’s me accessing Mastodon and the fediverse via email: https://lemmy.world/post/11020167 I’ve written a a couple more prototypes to connect one to the other. If anyone is interested I could write up more about how it works or do a more public demo
That's pretty cool, especially given we've all used the "federated, like email" example to describe the fediverse.
I'm curious about identity: does this require an account on an ActivityPub enabled server, or is there a possibility of tricking AP instances into parsing an email address as a profile URL?
Would definitely be interested in seeing something like this explained. It would be weirdly cool if newsletters and mailing lists entered federation space (Star Trek pun very much intended).
If Email was sorted into "public" and "private" it could be.
Theoretically a RSS reader is similar tech where it fetches all these sources, so in this case fetching public email account data.
Of course upvotes, badges, etc would need to be handled by a 3rd party service unless you made them public and added them to the email chain.
RSS is kinda different. Subscribing is really just polling a file. ActivityPub messages are primarily sent around by first requesting a server to send messages to you. It’s a pull versus push thing.
I love RSS because it’s so simple. It actually goes a long way in the fediverse where most activity, which is read-only. Only a small percentage of users ever comment/post stuff.
@electricprism @fediverse
People have different definitions of "the fediverse". To some people fediverse is ActivityPub, but to some people it is any federated protocol.
SMTP is a federated protocol, so some people would consider it part of the fediverse.
POP3 isn't federated, it is standardized but different POP3 servers don't connect to each other in regular process of the protocol.
I think email is federated, but it's not a social network in the usual sense of the word. You don't have public feeds and profiles and such. Mailing lists are probably the closest thing, but you still have to subscribe to those to receive messages.
Offtopic but this certainly was interesting
https://flathub.org/apps/chat.delta.desktop
The concept is solid but the version could use some work