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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] 20 points 1 year ago (16 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] 14 points 1 year ago (15 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] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I use GPG mail with Apple Mail client and it works great. Just need to get the public keys of people you want to send encrypted email to.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Not sure how anyone can say “GPG” and “Works great” in the same sentence tbh. GPG is a usability nightmare except for the most advanced users who use it. Good luck trying to get your house contractor or doctor or representative or non-techie friends and family or really anyone to give you their “public key”

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