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.

pegged

Haha

usenet was Lemmy without the web UI

.

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

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

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.

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?

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.

And XMPP (1999).

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.

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.

I use proton and simplelogin aliases. Both doing fine

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.

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.

yahoo?

I noticed they seem to be intentionally locking out smaller domains and I hope that backfires. Not holding my breath though.

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.

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.

What on earth are you talking about?? Of course they don’t have to compete. It’s a meme. It’s meant to be funny, not accurate. What does my ego have to do with anything?

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.

Ah, I see. A youngling who never heard of the usenet.

Lemmy admins have fundamentally broken the idea of federation with defederation.

How very IRC of them.

Be a better admin. I’ll join your instance once it’s set up.

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.

You’ve probably never tried using email outside of Google, Outlook, Yahoo or Proton but let me tell you it doesn’t just work. A lot of the servers have been blocked by the big first 3, sometimes soft-blocks being redirected to the Spam folder, but often times hard blocks where they don’t get through at all. So it very much does matter what email service you do use, as many of the smaller ones and domains you might obtain to set up your own have been defederated, much more aggressively might I add. It doesn’t take much for a domain to end up on spamhaus’ or other spam lists, and it’s a big pain to get them off said lists.

Let’s compare with Defederation of activitypub services (because Lemmy devs didn’t invent the idea of deferation, it’s part of ActivityPub standard and is a thing on all activitypub platforms), something that typically happens when a server is spamming, spreading violent or hateful messages, or otherwise engaged in unproductive or harmful behavior (i.e. trolling, rudeness towards others, etc.). We don’t use spamhaus or a similar equivalent service to filter “spam” automatically, much of it is done by server admins themself, there are tools like Fediseer meant to keep track of instances which are trusted as well as identifying known bad actors, but since this is community driven and not monolithic it is different from spamhaus and the like.

In all honesty the Defederation boogeyman is a very stupid argument, especially when comparing it to email which has ironically been hit the hardest by it. It has effectively been reduced to a handful of big players while all the other smaller ones out there find themselves unable to compete. Meanwhile on the activitypub side defederation is still an issue but it is a minor one and is limited to edge cases or bad behavior. One thing that is important to note, and why it isn’t talked about more frequently to other people is this. When people invite others to join the Fediverse, they naturally assume the people who are joining are NOT trolls, alt-right sociopaths, neonazis, pedophiles, spammers, etc. and thus are not likely to have their accounts banned or the servers they start get widely defederated. If you are one of those people chances are you aren’t the target demographic for most fediverse servers out there, and thus you will face friction, bans, and mass defederation because people do not want you in their spaces or to listen to your dogshit propaganda.

The Fediverse was never about freeze peach, it’s about collaboration and cooperation between services, and most services do not want to collaborate with people who are assholes. The people still claiming that it is for free speech are lying or misinformed, because on most servers if you speak your mind and say things that are unacceptable or evil, there will be consequences. That means bans from those servers or defederation if you run your own.

I would argue that you really don’t need to understand lemmy to use it either, that’s a cultural issue with lemmy users.

Always remember that someone is in the days 10000!

I really wish email had a built-in aliases feature. Like, so you can create unlimited new addresses that just point to your normal inbox. That would help so much with spam, since you could just block individual aliases. I know some email providers have this feature, but usually it’s paid. Plus Addressing is also nice, but it does nothing to hide your “real” address. Also I’m disappointed that end-to-end encrypted email is basically never used by normal people.

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.

It is a standard, starting at RFC 6120. Everyone can use it today. 😃

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

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.

IRC, bulletin boards that had links to each other…. The old net was decentralised by default.

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

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.

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