2y ago

What's the fundamental difference between Fediverse/ActivityPub/Lemmy and the Usenet?

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?

31 comments

- Was this written by AI?
  
  Yeah it felt like it, at least. The first difference about origin and era threw me off; people in general are not interested in it and would probably not list the facts like that.
  It felt uncomfortable and disingenuous reading it. I would have preferred if it ended with either “This is written by Chat-GPT” or “I used Chat-GPT then edited it”. Like the TLDR/Peertube bot on Lemmy, at least they sign it with their identity when they’re bot accounts.
  
  Chad gpt enters the room. Yes.
  
  My first thought
  
  i think it may have been. might as well, even if you put in time writing its likely to be assumed AI anyway, esp as it improves.
  
  Definitely. Humans don't write that way unless they're paid to. It reads like bland marketing material.
- Thanks ChatGPT!
- This looks like written by ChatGPT, and it is in many ways straight up off-topic or wrong.
  Origin/Era: yeah, duh. That was already stated in the question.
  Architecture: It doesn't actually show any differences, it just doesn't talk about different parts of the architecture. Usenet is also federated and Fediverse instances also don't store all messages.
  Content structure: This is the closest to an actual answer. But from what it seems, the default use case of the Usenet is identical to Lemmy.
  Protocols: Stated in the question. NNTP is also federated.
  Moderation: This is straight-up wrong. There are moderated and unmoderated newsgroups, same as there are moderated and unmoderated instances/communities on the fediverse.
  Modern Relevance: This whole section is irrelevant to the question.
  
  Sorry I should marked it as AI :) From my experience usenet is more uncesored compared to fediverse. The most issue with fedi is that there is no tru replication system (mayby except sometimes data might be cached on other instance).
- Don't. Use your own words or don't even respond to the thread.
- And you don't hear PLONK around here as much, either.
  
  Well, you don't hear it, but it does happen.
- Well, we had posts, discussions, and even media in USENET back then. The only real differences I see are that fediverse is more modern and media-aware, and that people actively battle spam/bots/trolls, which in my time on usenet was not really an issue, though.
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
- 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.
- While, correct....
  Doesn't actually answer anything about the question.
  The question was, essentially, how is the fediverse different from usenet. Which- is indeed a valid question, since both are completely different technologies, which accomplish similar goals,
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.

31 comments