Does email (SMTP/POP3) count as a member of the fediverse?
Does email (SMTP/POP3) count as a member of the fediverse?
i think it might in theory
24 comments
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Fediverse is ActivityPub. Email is not, though the theory is somewhat similar.
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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.
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fair enough, i wonder if there are lessons to learn from email that can help the fediverse
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Well for one, email is inherently insecure, so not sure if the fediverse can learn from that. It’s already not private.
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@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.
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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?
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I think Usenet would be closer to the Fediverse than the email
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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
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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).
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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Offtopic but this certainly was interesting
https://flathub.org/apps/chat.delta.desktop
The concept is solid but the version could use some work
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