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Will we ever stop referring to the Web as “the Internet”?
Whats the difference?
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.
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 two protocols: IP and TCP.
There’s 65000-ish ports (channels) available on the internet.
The web runs on port 80 and 443.
The internet supports all sorts of other traffic 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.
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.
The advent of REST API endpoints really muddies everything up when all requests are going over the web.
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.
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.
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.
Totally serious. Never knew there is a difference. Thanks for the explanation.
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.
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.
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.
No.
To be fair, the definition is a bit muddier nowadays. Is Lemmy on the Web? I don’t use it via the website. Bulletin boards used to not be part of the Web, as they pre-date the Web. But nowadays everything is HTTP. There’s so little non-web left, and the vast majority of users never use it, that the Internet is only used for accessing the Web.
But it’s not muddy though. The Internet is the infrastructure that the web runs across. And there are still plenty of other protocols out there beside the web that are in use every single day. Even if the average user were to primarily use the Internet for accessing the web, it doesn’t mean the definitions of the two have become muddy. Interstate 4 is not Walt Disney World, even if you only ever drive I-4 to get to Disney.
BitTorrent is a pretty big part of the Internet though.