Lemmy and the Usenet?

Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 112 points – 1 years ago

After reading a bit about Usenet, it seems to me as if the whole Fediverse seems to be just a reinvention of Usenet.

What's the big difference?

Actual attempt at an answer!

ActivityPub has actors and activities. These are very broadly defined - yes, a user is an actor, but so is a magazine in kbin. A like, a thread, and a microblog are all activities. These come from an actor, and they are sent to and cc'd to other actors in the fediverse.

NNTP, however, is not actor to actor, it's server to server, to my understanding.

In practice, the way this is implemented here, it's not that much of a practical difference, but it's interesting to know.

The other difference is that NNTP servers would forward messages to their other known NNTP servers, essentially creating a distributed network of information. Per the ActivityPub protocol however, no instance is obligated to do that on ActivityPub. The only obligation for forwarding is if a) The values of to, cc, and/or audience contain a Collection owned by the server (e.g. followers is a Collection) AND The values of inReplyTo, object, target and/or tag are objects owned by the server. So basically if I receive something from lemmy.world user actor, to lemmy.world community actor... Even if kbin.social hasn't received it and errored out, I have no obligation as the.coolest.zone to send it out to them.

Thanks, at least one who got what I was on aboutˆˆ

Ok, so we got a push vs pull model and a bit more differentiation in the protocol. So there is at least some improvement on the concept. When reading about it, it felt like yet another reinvention, but looks like there is at least some improvement on the idea. Thanks for the summary!

Not super educated on the subject but I'm pretty sure Usenet was just one platform/standard whereas the fediverse is a bunch of interoperable standards. That's a pretty huge leap I functionality

Fediverse is one standard - ActivityPub.

Yeah but there's different ways to interact with the fediverse via activitypub, whereas Usenet was just. Usenet

It’s actually several standards, the primary one is activitypub but mastodon also uses webfinger, and for example peertube uses p2p transfers to serve video

But they aren't compatible, are they? Which would make it multiple, disconnected fediverses.

No, i can follow and post to mastodon accounts from here, and I’ve posted my cat to !cat from my mastodon, sometimes you lose certain fields (mastodon doesn’t really know what to do with upvotes, so it doesn’t display them when I’m logged into mastodon) but the post works fine on lemmy. I also follow peertube accounts from my mastodon too

Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn't work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !cat@lemmy.world

The Usenet is a very old and federated system. Same as the Fediverse, the Usenet is based around a single protocol (NNTP vs ActivityPub which Fediverse uses). Same as on the Fediverse, there are lots of different applications for it, that represent data in a different way.

Good question! I'd say that the fediverse is semantically much more complex and thus allows for more progress. It's like the difference between gopher and the web.

Here’s an analogy from a non technical person.

Fediverse is the universe.

The protocol is the laws of nature by which the universe functions.

Lemmy is a galaxy or cluster of galaxies in the universe.

Thanks, I know how the fediverse works and what protocols is. My question was about the Usenet and the Fediverse serving exactly the same purpose in almost the same way.