Post #4928715 · Elektrine

2026-10-05 03:10 UTC

Please pay attention to: Each news server talks to one or more other servers (its “newsfeeds”) and exchanges articles with them. hmmm… it sounds like p2p. This is describing federation, not P2P. The servers communicate with each other. P2P is when users communicate directly. Would you consider Lemmy or email as P2P? They’re also federated. It’s not p2p for the enduser, but that’s why i said it was server p2p. There’s no definition of P2P that involves servers communicating with each other.

Replies (1)

@MEtrINeS@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2026-10-05 06:29

P2P is when users communicate directly. P2P means peer to peer! Definition of peer: 2. countable noun Your peers are the people who are the same age as you or who have the same status as you. His engaging personality made him popular with his peers. Synonyms: equal, like, match, fellow [old-fashioned] More Synonyms of peer “The same status” , Synonyms: equal. This is describing federation and decentralization, not P2P. It’s very similar but not the same. Using lemmy as example, when i request posts from another server, my server will request only those posts. It won’t request everything. Do you see the difference? A CDN is centralized in control but distributed in delivery: one content owner controls the authoritative data, while a CDN operator replicates it across its infrastructure. In p2p nobody controls the authoritative data - if one peer refuses to distribute the data, my server can still get the data from another feed. Both federation or CDNs don’t work in a P2P manner. They either have selective replication and/or centralized control. Usenet has companies running the servers, and you download from and upload to the company’s servers. Again this has nothing to do with being p2p or not. And btw, stop moving the goal posts.

Open ##4929937