this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2024
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[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

Think of the Internet as the US Interstate Highway system. The web is a chain of tourist attractions you can visit along those roads.

The Internet is the physical and logical collection of interconnected networks. The web is a protocol that runs on top of that infrastructure, just as email, ssh, ftp, irc, etc. do.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (4 children)

Not sure if a serious question. So forgive me if your question was meant to be a statement.

The internet is a large set of computers connected via a set of protocols: IP and on top of that TCP, UDP or very occasionally SCTP (more common on mobile networks).

There’s 65000-ish ports (channels) available on the internet (IP network).

The web runs on port 80 and 443 via TCP (mostly).

The internet supports all sorts of other traffic/channels too: Time synchronisation, games, file transfer, e-mail, remote login, remote desktops etc. None of these run on the web, but is traffic that runs in parallel to the web, using either TCP or UDP protocols.

The distinction is getting blurrier as lots of traffic that used to be assigned (or simple chose) its own port number is now encapsulated in HTTP(s) traffic. But the distinction is definitely not gone.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Where does Lemmy fall on this spectrum? Obviously the website part is 100% web, but I’m accessing Lemmy through a mobile app, so I don’t see any website here.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

Well this is what I mean. In the olden days, this would be custom traffic on a custom port. Nowadays it just uses web HTTPS REST calls as API.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

Appreciate this, I thought they were both called "the internet". I knew we called it the worldwide web when I was a kid, but I thought that was just a phrase that fell out of fashion.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago

Totally serious. Never knew there is a difference. Thanks for the explanation.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago (1 children)

The advent of REST API endpoints really muddies everything up when all requests are going over the web.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Yes agreed. I suspect it will collapse to “non-time-critical traffic will run on HTTPS via REST” and “everything else will run on UDP, using their own ports”, except for maybe a couple of golden oldies like NTP, FTP, SMTP/POP/IMAP.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

POP and IMAP are pretty much dead at this point. Email is basically dead at this point. Want to spin up a machine and have it email you system messages? Nope. Want to run a Python script that sends to gmail? lol. https://mailtrap.io/blog/gmail-smtp/

On all my microservers I have pretty much have 22, 80, and 443 open. I try to interact exclusively over web ports for as much as possible.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

It’s hard, but not impossible, to get a personal mail server trusted amongst the big players, agreed.

That doesn’t mean email can’t be accessed with IMAP (or heaven forbid, POP3) on the big players. Outlook, gmail, FastMail, proton etc all support it.