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Email is the oldest Federated service. (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I was struggling to wrap my head around how federated social media works until I realized that email has basically been doing the same thing for 30 years. Different email servers are like instances of a federated network. You can send emails to people from within a single server or you can send emails to people on any other mail server. Your email address is a username followed by an '@' and the server address, just like on Lemmy. Email is a decentralized service I've been using the whole time!

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Unfortunately, what email has also shown is that platforms can develop much faster than protocols. I hope all works out for lemmy in the end, but it will be interesting.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Absolutely. Now we're stuck using a protocol that has zero encryption because decades ago no one thought about that. All our private correspondence is readable by every ISP and government it passes. If only we could make an email 2.0...

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I mean, it's not like theres really anything stopping the big providers to implement PGP on top of Email.
They just don't, because users don't care. So you have to do it yourself, in a plugin or whatever.
Still works, just more cumbersome, but I wouldn't blame the protocol... at all.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Adopting a consistent way to do it that everyone agrees on is the hardest part. PGP works but you have to make it easy and integrate it with all the top email providers so that most people are using it without even noticing.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

you wouldn't even relly need to find one consistent way, just identify the way servers do it, and have a list of supported methods.

let's say there are implenetations a,b,c, and d
if let's say google supported b,c and d, and apple b, and hotmal c and d, only hotmail-apple traffic would be unencrypted as they can't agree on a common method.

pretty sure that's how TLS (i.e. https) works.