this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2023
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Asklemmy
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Email today still works through 7 bit ASCII, with various methods to encode modern text that can be nested (and need to be for some software). It's lack of sender authentication has led to a situation where SPF+DKIM+DMARC still doesn't prove that the from: address you see in your mail client is actually the one that the email is coming from. The whole thing is kind of a mess these days.
We use email because it's the industry standard, the protocol itself is a real pain to deal with if you actually want your email to be read by real world mail servers.
XMPP was designed during a time when encrypted group chats weren't really a thing. A client supporting all chat extensions would be an amazing chat client and there are actually a few of them out there. Nobody uses XMPP, though, because of the network effect of better advertised messengers.
Matrix was designed more recently and has better native group support, but that too is only used by enthusiasts. At least open source projects have taken up the protocol as an alternative to IRC (which was also federated, by the way!) but it's still not the universal federated messenger we all crave.
With the upcoming MLS and MIMI standards, I hope we'll soon see better interoperability between services that will allow federated services to integrate seamlessly into the bigger app ecosystems. The EU's DMA will soon force bit tech companies to open up and integrate, so who knows what the future may hold!
Yeah. You can tell Email is old. very old. The internet has exploded since then. There are so many more nodes and users out there than anyone would have imagined in the early 80s. Also technology has advanced together with how we use it. 7-bit is madness by today's standards. Of course Antispam and E2EE hasn't been baked in because it wasn't a thing back then.
But things are different today. I don't think there will be another 'explosion' so that the requirements to such a protocol and it's usage will change as quickly and fundamentally.
Funny thing is, the resource usage of my mailserver or XMPP server is so much less than for example my Matrix server or any of the other 'modern' federated things i tried... And we should learn from XMPP's history. Both good and bad things. It's a complicated story and there is more to the story than just network effect or technical issues. And I love and hate Matrix. I'm glad it's there but i also wasted several hours looking for good client for linux that isn't element and uses all of my RAM. And fought with encryption in some python libraries. Sometimes matrix just isn't fun. Especially the encryption bit.
I don't care for the network effect. I have used both XMPP and Matrix. There was a time I could reach all my friends via XMPP. Back in the days when both Facebook and GMail had XMPP and WhatsApp wasn't there yet. As of today. I use Matrix. And the few people I talk to most frequently also use Matrix. And that's enough for me. I don't care if 99% of other people use something different. (Also there are bridges to other protocols). It's the same with Lemmy. I wouldn't be here if it was important to me to be on a platform with 1.5 billion other users.
I think we have an opportunity to do it right. And to design something that will last for quite a while. Of course there are issues to solve on several levels. Unfortunately back in the days, protocols were invented by scientists and to connect universities. Todays platforms are implemented by mega-corporations and their motive is to gather data and sell advertisement. So we probably need regulations and politics to force something like interoperability into existence. And of course there is the age-old question of reform vs. revolution. Iterative change sometimes isn't good enough. I'd consider email a case where we need revolution. I'd happily use some free sucessor. Even before the network effect or regulation kicks in.
There are so many issues with email that are not fixable... And federation, dispite all the advantages it has, is the main reason why it's entirely unfeasible to actually fix the issues in the system.
Federation, same as every other concept, has advantages and downsides.
Having looked into the Lemmy code and the discussions on Github sadly doesn't bode too well. It looks like a mostly quick-and-dirty project and I fear it's going to get only more troublesome as it grows. I am not sure if it could ever scale to Reddit-dimensions.
Part of that can already be observed with all the desynchronisation between instances, because there is no guaranteed eventual consistency or any other mechanisms like that, even though that would be fundamentally important for a distributed system like Lemmy.
This is exactly what I wanted to say, just put much more eloquently. Thanks!