this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2023
213 points (100.0% liked)

Technology

37742 readers
489 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
 

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
[–] jmcs@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Good point. Can we all go back to it?

[–] xuu@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Not really.. Google "bought" it out back in the early 2000s and took over the archives. And turned it into its groups product.

[–] DrWeevilJammer@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Google bought the company Deja and got their software, which turned into Google groups, and also got their Usenet archive.

They didn't buy Usenet itself (which would be like buying "email"), and it is still very much alive, but it has changed, and most people have moved their preferred place to have discussions elsewhere.

Note: I was going to say "would be like buying a cloud", but Google Cloud is a thing, so...yeah.

[–] xuu@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 1 year ago

I was relying heavily on the quotes around "bought". A large amount of Usenet had consolidated under Deja which went to Google. While there is still some remnants around. What it was before is no where near the same as it is now.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (3 replies)