this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2023
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Email is the oldest Federated service. (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago by nodsocket@lemmy.world to c/technology@beehaw.org
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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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[–] TheYang@lemmy.ml 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.

[–] nodsocket@lemmy.world 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.

[–] TheYang@lemmy.ml 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.