i think it might in theory

  • zeppo@lemmy.worldEnglish
    315·
    9 months ago

    Fediverse is ActivityPub. Email is not, though the theory is somewhat similar.

      • zeppo@lemmy.worldEnglish
        85·
        9 months ago

        The others listed are bluesky, nostra and farcast. I suppose we could count protocols that nobody uses…

    • jimmy90@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      4·
      9 months ago

      fair enough, i wonder if there are lessons to learn from email that can help the fediverse

      • edric@lemm.eeEnglish
        63·
        9 months ago

        Well for one, email is inherently insecure, so not sure if the fediverse can learn from that. It’s already not private.

          • edric@lemm.eeEnglish
            21·
            9 months ago

            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.

              • edric@lemm.eeEnglish
                2·
                9 months ago

                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.

      • Oliver Lowe@hachyderm.io
        21·
        9 months ago

        @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.

        @fediverse

  • rbn@feddit.chEnglish
    192·
    9 months ago

    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?

  • Oliver Lowe@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    5·
    9 months ago

    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

    • Handles@leminal.spaceEnglish
      3·
      9 months ago

      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).

  • electricprismEnglish
    4·
    9 months ago

    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.

    • Oliver Lowe@hachyderm.io
      3·
      9 months ago

      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

  • kevincoxEnglish
    4·
    9 months ago

    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.

  • shrugal@lemm.eeEnglish
    1·
    9 months ago

    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.