A historical review of the multi-decade centralization and capture of the email protocol.

Interesting history and analysis of SMTP’s history. How can we prevent fedi and other open protocols from suffering the same fates?

  • Telorand@reddthat.com
    0·
    6 months ago

    Ultimately defederating bad actors and defederating “good” actors who fail to moderate their own users is necessary.

    Agreed, and this is what makes the Fediverse so good. It would be annoying to lose your instance, true, but you just move to another or roll your own. Additionally, let’s say they start spamming Mastodon from mastodon.social; their messages would go to the Global channel, but if I only ever read Local or Subscriptions, I’ll never see their spam.

    The Fediverse and ActivityPub will continue to evolve, but unlike SMTP, they were created after the internet became adversarial. This author isn’t the first to try to fearmonger over the future of AP, and they won’t be the last.

    • makeasnek@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
      0·
      6 months ago

      It would be annoying to lose your instance, true, but you just move to another or roll your own.

      This is a problem nostr solved, and I believe bluesky solves as well though idk as much about the protocol. On nostr, your identity and your instance are different things. Relay goes down? There’s no meaningful impact to you. You’re typically connected to several, each of which store your content. You identity isn’t username@somerelay dot com, it’s just username.

      As a user, I had this happen to me early in mastodon and it was very frustrating to lose all my follows, followers, tweets, settings, etc. I realize there’s now ways to manually backup etc but properly moving an account requires a cooperative instance which can’t happen if it’s de-federated or just drops offline randomly like mine did.

      The Fediverse and ActivityPub will continue to evolve, but unlike SMTP, they were created after the internet became adversarial. This author isn’t the first to try to fearmonger over the future of AP, and they won’t be the last.

      This isn’t fearmongering, it’s him reviewing the ways SMTP tried to solve the spam problem and became centralized as a result. These questions of how we tackle spam and moderation are valid, important questions. And Fediverse, at a structural level, is basically the same as SMTP.

      • Telorand@reddthat.com
        0·
        6 months ago

        It is fearmongering, albeit unintended, but I don’t think it completely applies to the Fediverse as it stands. We should always remain vigilant and never complacent, and I’m sure the devs and moderators are keeping spam control in their minds. This isn’t the 1980s, and we’re not trying to retrofit a protocol that came before spam was ever a thing.