Technology

37742 readers

492 users here now

A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

alyaza@beehaw.org

TheRtRevKaiser@beehaw.org

gyrfalcon@beehaw.org

rs5th@beehaw.org

Los@beehaw.org

coldredlight@beehaw.org

SemioticStandard@beehaw.org

TheRtRevKaiser@kbin.social

remington@beehaw.org

213

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

submitted 1 year ago by nodsocket@lemmy.world to c/technology@beehaw.org

73 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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!

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] TheYang@lemmy.ml 15 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 4 points 1 year ago (2 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 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] unique_hemp@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 1 year ago

It used to, but v1.3 supports only 3 ciphers now.

[–] sam@queernerds.social 4 points 1 year ago

@nodsocket @technology I think the real challenge with the user experience of PGP is making it possible for people to actually do the whole “web of trust” think in a practical way, and making management of private keys over a long period of time by individuals. It’s way too easy to lose your keys