FOSSDLE PieFedFederated social media from before it was cool
lemmy.world/pictrs/image/b6b596d4-03f2-44c0-89e…
submitted by renzev
It's funny when armchair experts insist that the fediverse won't catch on because "federation is too hard to understand" when arguably the most widespread communication system on the internet follows the same model
i feel like the newsgroups could also be pegged as an early distributed/mass-audience environment similar to what we see today... multiple nodes sharing sometimes identical loads of content
i miss tagline management.. bluewave
e. ALso! the star trek nonsense was strong with alt.wesly.crusher.die.die.die!
We’ve got some strong Star Trek nonsense brewing in !tenforward@lemmy.world
Yeah, Usenet was where it was at back at the turn of the millennium. Then again, I had access through a university. Access wasn't free outside of places like that.
ISPs were spotty on coverage because even at that time, they needed at least a terabyte of storage to dedicate to it, and still not be able to cover everything that was on there. Of course, they might've got away with less if they decided not to carry the binaries newsgroups...
The way it worked was a lot like how Fediverse federation works now, or similarly, filesharing. It was possible to be reading a thread of messages and the older ones wouldn't be available on your local/ISP news server because their space had been recycled for newer data.
If you were lucky, your attempt to access that message might cause your host to grab it on a future request to upstream hosts or peers, but some Usenet messages are completely lost to time because everyone purged them.
Google buying Dejanews, the largest archive of all messages, and merging it with the travesty that was (and still is) Google Groups just about killed the whole thing.
Well that and the fact that it was unmoderated which eventually led to it being populated almost exclusively with mentally ill troll savants. USENET by the end was the digital equivalent of a horror zoo of abused monkeys slinging shit all over everyone and themselves.
Fun fact: that's not strictly true.
You *could* have moderated groups, where a moderator/group of moderators would get sent every post via email, and they'd only be posted into the group if approved.
The vast, vast, vast majority of groups were not moderated, but that's not to say you couldn't do so.
I don't think they mean unmoderated as in can't be moderated but just that they weren't moderated.
Yes pardon me I left off the word "largely" before "unmoderated." We all knew it was possible, but it didn't matter because, as you point out - nobody really did.
I wouldn't bet on that, which is why I mentioned moderated groups at all. As you said, they're rare and even *if* you used usenet 20 or 25 or 30 years ago, the odds that you'd have ever seen one was shockingly low.
So even ex-usenet users might not have a clue that there was a method for doing that (let alone any of the people who aren't that old), which is why I brought it up.
ISP around me had policies like "we can provide Usenet except for the binaries trees"
Haha
usenet was Lemmy without the web UI
ach ja!
I get the argument, but email is also very different to the kind of open-web network that the fediverse resides in. There are problems the fediverse faces which email doesn't like discoverability. The emails either come to you or they don't. With federated social media, you have to find the content you're looking for first. Maybe you use a search engine, or somebody gives you a business card with their handle and instance, whatever. Then you have to figure out how to view those posts from your home instance if you want to actually interact in any way. There's browser extensions and stuff which try to make this easier, but that's another thing that has to be explained and set up, plus not everyone is visiting from a web browser with extension support, or a web browser at all for that matter.
It's not fundamentally impossible to understand the fediverse, but there's more of a barrier than email, which can be explained in a single sentence like "Your email provider gives you a unique address that anybody else can send emails to and vice versa." I don't think convincing ourselves that the fediverse is actually very simple is going to convince people *outside* the bubble that that's true.
There's a difference between 'technically simple' and 'understandable UX'.
Your mom doesn't need to know how ActivityPub works or the intricacies of federation. She just needs to know to log in and go to c/cutecats.
The early-adopter curse here is causing way too much technobabble to be involved in descriptions that just confuse people, and it's technical aspects that the nerd cohort here is fascinated by, but uh, nobody else is.
The real leap will be to resist the urge to pull out the PPT and spend 3 hours and 10,000 words explaining how Lemmy *works* vs the much more concise how-to-use-Lemmy details that people actually want.
There's a lot of assumptions being made by a lot of people that "normal" people are stupid and couldn't understand 'It's a conversation platform like Reddit, but it's run by it's users and that's why there's a lot of servers who all talk to each other' and so there's a lot of hand wringing about how you have to explain all the details and such, which really, isn't all that true.
Every non-technical person I've explained it to like that immediately understands what it is, how you'd use it, and what it's used for and I'll occasionally get a 'Oh, neat, how does all that work?' question I can then expand on, but that's like, maybe 1 out of 20.
TLDR: too many details is not helpful for most people, and nerds loooooove going into more detail than anyone could possibly care about
Welcome to the Nerdiverse, where normies are kept out of.
There is discoveribility, but no one uses it. It's called Web of Trust (by PGP).
Link, please?
Doesn’t really have the same purpose but…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_trust
Thank you either way.
Perhaps a better analogy would be Usenet, IRC, or XMPP?
The point being made is really just the identity of user being tied to User@domain.tld vs @handle it seems like that concept has died with Web 2.0. Only thing I would improve of the fediverse. If communities could be merged with when a group of instances agree to form a network. Like how IRC does it with channels. I mean yeah there would be netsplits from time to time but it would cut down on duplication and increase the traffic of niche communities like the benefits of central platforms get but it's still distributed.
Well with email if you want emails to come to you you also have to search for it and sign up your email to a list to receive them or give your email to people for them to send you stuff.
In lemmy you need to go to a community finder and find communities you want then you copy their link and paste it in your home instance search bar and hit follow. With email you need to search the web for a sites email list then paste your email in their and say you want to receive their email
I don’t care if it catches on, I’m enjoying it here where the people are still awesome.
Federation really isn't hard to understand especially when you dive in and start using it. I don't understand anyone who says otherwise.
Somehow this sentiment exists in the selfhosted subreddit and is why the community didn't move to Lemmy. One of the last places I'd expect to let something kinda technical scare them tbh.
It's an excuse, people don't want to just say they don't want to do it, so they make an excuse not to, saying it's ""complicated"". They don't feel like it or hate it for some irrational reason, possibly a misconception or just hate change.
If you see someone making excuses like this, or even casually making fun of the idea of decentralization and the fediverse, challenge them on it, point out how they are making excuses simply because they don't want to do it, or say no. Ask them how it is "complicated" and make them give an explanation. 90% of the people I've done this with couldn't come up with one and just acted embarrassed after, because they couldn't come up with one. It's a mindless excuse.
"Federation" is like "non-fungible token". Everyone knows what it is, but they've never heard it called that.
Yeah and then google+microsoft rolled in and killed the decentralized nature of email with gmail and outlook.
Only sign left of the good ol days is merged accounts with @ old domain names and the few that self host.
It's not really like they were evil about it though. Google attracted customers through its huge (at the time) 1 GB email storage space, which at the time, was unbelievably generous and also impressive in that it was offered for free. Outlook (Hotmail at the time) also drew in customers by offering the service for free, anywhere in the world, without needing to sign up for Internet service. Remember, at the time, e-mail was a service that was bundled with your Internet service provider.
Into the mid-2000s and 2010s, the way that Gmail and Outlook kept customers was through bundle deals for enterprise customers and improvements to their webmail offerings. Gmail had (and arguably, still has) one of the best webmail clients available anywhere. Outlook was not far behind, and it was also usually bundled with enterprise Microsoft Office subscriptions, so most companies just decided, "eh, why not". The price (free) and simplicity is difficult to beat. It was at that point that Microsoft Outlook (the mail client, not the e-mail service) was the "gold standard" for desktop mail clients, at least according to middle-aged office workers who barely knew anything about e-mail to begin with. Today, the G-Suite, as it is called, is one of the most popular enterprise software suites, perhaps second only to Microsoft Office. Most people learned how to use e-mail and the Internet in the 2000s and 2010s through school or work.
You have to compare the offerings of Google and Microsoft with their competitors. AOL mail was popular but the Internet service provided by the same company was not. When people quit AOL Internet service, many switched e-mail providers as well, thinking that if they did not maintain their AOL subscription, they would lose access to their mailbox as well.
Google and Microsoft didn't "kill" the decentralised e-mail of yesteryear. They beat it fair and square by offering a superior product. If you're trying to pick an e-mail service today, Gmail and Outlook are still by far the best options in terms of ease of use, free storage, and the quality of their webmail clients. I would even go so far as to say that the Gmail web client was so good that it single-handedly killed the desktop mail client for casual users. I think that today, there are really only three legitimate players left if you're a rational consumer who is self-interested in picking the best e-mail service for yourself: Proton Mail if you care a lot about privacy, and Gmail or Outlook if you don't.
Sure, they might've cornered the market fair and square, but they're certainly doing anticompetitive things in keeping it cornered.
Just try setting up a mail server not connected to any of the big corpos (Google, MS, Cloudflare or their clients with more niche marketing) and see who will actually recieve your mails. You most likely won't land into the Spam folder either.
It is also worth considering that yes, MS and Google have definitely dominated the market through superior products, but the standards they've pushed for and established have also made it difficult for other players to enter. If we wanted to say that the federated nature of email is dead, I think that's a fair argument still.
Hosting your own email server is quite difficult. You have to jump through a lot of hoops to land in anyone's mailbox without assistance. If you want to make a mailing list, you basically need to use a mailing service, lest you get blacklisted by major systems owned by MS and Google. Much of this is a byproduct of spam, by which I don't blame Google and MS for doing their best to protect against, but at the same time they have more or less neutered some core aspects of what made email accessible.
Nice to see someone else was around when the lore was written :D
In NZ instead of AOL it was xtra and Paradise.
@yahoo.com is still somewhat popular among us old farts.
I would be one of you if they didn't purge my accounts years ago. The trust will never return.
Among us 😳📮
just imagine if we could only communicate with people using the same mail service like the newer internet.
Because you don't need to understand email to use it.
There have been decades of software and user interface advancements that have made the usage of email extremely simple and straightforward.
People also inherently grasp the idea of it because they understand the real world concept of mail.
Email is also one way. You aren't sending mail to and receiving mail from everyone at once, or reading mail one person sent to another and interjecting. You're just sending something to an address, not CC'ing *literally everyone all the time*.
Email also doesn't have any confusion around which mailboxes are allowed to speak to each other.
The fediverse is nowhere near that simple or intuitive.
Particularly Lemmy because Lemmy admins have fundamentally broken the idea of federation with defederation. It generally doesn't matter what email you use or what email the receiver uses, baring more niche services. It does actually matter what instance you're on.
We try to sell people on this comparison, try to explain to them that it's simple, but it's really a half-truth at best, or a lie at worst.
When you joined reddit, you know for a fact you're seeing everything, and the same thing as everyone else. The same posts, the same comments, the same vote counts. A simple, shared, unfiltered experience of everything was the default, and then you shaped it yourself.
That's not the case with the fediverse. There's no simple default. You have to build it yourself.
It was broken before then, the whole distributed user and instances is hard for the average non techy. This is the same issue Linux has. People say "just install Linux" but when the person Google's it, they get destroyed with 30 plus flavors and don't understand what to do.
You've probably never tried using email outside of Google, Outlook, Yahoo or Proton but let me tell you it doesn't just work. A lot of the servers have been blocked by the big first 3, sometimes soft-blocks being redirected to the Spam folder, but often times hard blocks where they don't get through at all. So it very much does matter what email service you do use, as many of the smaller ones and domains you might obtain to set up your own have been defederated, much more aggressively might I add. It doesn't take much for a domain to end up on spamhaus' or other spam lists, and it's a big pain to get them off said lists.
Let's compare with Defederation of activitypub services (because Lemmy devs didn't invent the idea of deferation, it's part of ActivityPub standard and is a thing on all activitypub platforms), something that typically happens when a server is spamming, spreading violent or hateful messages, or otherwise engaged in unproductive or harmful behavior (i.e. trolling, rudeness towards others, etc.). We don't use spamhaus or a similar equivalent service to filter "spam" automatically, much of it is done by server admins themself, there are tools like Fediseer meant to keep track of instances which are trusted as well as identifying known bad actors, but since this is community driven and not monolithic it is different from spamhaus and the like.
In all honesty the Defederation boogeyman is a very stupid argument, especially when comparing it to email which has ironically been hit the hardest by it. It has effectively been reduced to a handful of big players while all the other smaller ones out there find themselves unable to compete. Meanwhile on the activitypub side defederation is still an issue but it is a minor one and is limited to edge cases or bad behavior. One thing that is important to note, and why it isn't talked about more frequently to other people is this. When people invite others to join the Fediverse, they naturally assume the people who are joining are NOT trolls, alt-right sociopaths, neonazis, pedophiles, spammers, etc. and thus are not likely to have their accounts banned or the servers they start get widely defederated. If you are one of those people chances are you aren't the target demographic for most fediverse servers out there, and thus you will face friction, bans, and mass defederation because people do not want you in their spaces or to listen to your dogshit propaganda.
The Fediverse was never about freeze peach, it's about collaboration and cooperation between services, and most services do not want to collaborate with people who are assholes. The people still claiming that it is for free speech are lying or misinformed, because on most servers if you speak your mind and say things that are unacceptable or evil, there will be consequences. That means bans from those servers or defederation if you run your own.
Ah, I see. A youngling who never heard of the usenet.
I would argue that you really don't need to understand lemmy to use it either, that's a cultural issue with lemmy users.
Always remember that someone is in the days 10000!
How very IRC of them.
Be a better admin. I'll join your instance once it's set up.
Nobody is talking about Diaspora anymore ¯\_ (ツ) _/¯
I used to run Diaspora* on my home server for a while, thought it was cool. Stopped doing so when I realized no one used it.
Usenet?
IRC, bulletin boards that had links to each other…. The old net was decentralised by default.
... but lemmy and masto do completely different things
masto's a microblogging platform like twitter and lemmy is a link aggregator like reddit
honestly i kinda wish there were a rebuild of email that is compatible with the old system but was redesigned from the ground up to do the job better
I’m not technical enough to think it through carefully but I’ve always thought there was an opportunity for an organization like USPS to develop email 2.0 - something that gives people some kind of verifiable and secure email address so that users can easily find each other whilst filtering out spam (or to have spam taken into consideration in the design at the outset). You would design it based on strict standards that would be difficult to get around so that big tech could not easily co-opt it, and adopt for some kind of critical function (taxes, voting maybe?) so that it would encourage adoption en masse. Make it distributed so that users can selfhost it easily, safely, and securely.
Yeah man if I were in charge of the post office I'd definitely push for that AND the return of postal banking. Every post office in the United States would be your one stop service for this email so if there are authentication issues or anything you can actually go there and talk to a PERSON, IN-PERSON.
You would use this system specifically for official government correspondence, and also it'd be better for job seeking too - any situation where you need to be communicating as YOURSELF, fully verified.
I'd even throw in social media features. Forums, microblogging, live chat groups... however, everyone's identity is clear and certain. No anonymity here. There is privacy insofar as what's between you and the government stays between you and the government, but if you want anonymity and to express opinions without someone knowing who you are, that's to be done elsewhere.
Instead of a social media website that lies to you and pretends dishonestly to give you privacy, this would have to be up front about the fact that it's public property. A town square where you're wearing a name tag. If you don't want your neighbors knowing your rhetorical positions, post them elsewhere. Those other places, private services, and important and need to exist as counterbalance.
I'm sure many criminals would be stupid enough to use it for human trafficking and contraband smuggling shit though so that'll help uncover and discipline rogue elements.
It does not though. I made a post the other day from the StarTrek.website instance and couldn't figure out if nobody had upvoted or commented on it, then tried to look it up on my regular discuss.online instance where it didn't exist, then went further to look it up on Lemmy.world (where the community is located) and saw that tens of people had. I wasn't able to respond to any of those at first though, until it caught up on an instance where I already had an account (edit: except I could *not* do that from the StarTrek.website instance where I had made the post from, bc it hadn't seen the comment yet even the next day - so I had to do it from a third instance involved in all this.)
And that wasn't even the only time *that very same day* that I saw a post existing/not existing and/or having a different number of comments and differences in voting counts. Perhaps 0.19.6 will help with some of these issues, at least on Lemmy but then PieFed, Mbin, and eventually Sublinks are still going to have to figure things out on their own as well.
So I am glad that things are going well for you who I note is on Lemmy.world, but the rest of the Fediverse is definitely struggling, in part because rather than in spite of that centralization. Also I note that Lemmy.world federating smoothly within itself doesn't even count in my book as "federation" at all! That's just Reddit 2.0 with everything on a single server, with all the benefits and pitfalls which that entails.
More generally when the subject is man vs. bear, and someone chooses bear, it doesn't help to simply laugh at those making that choice. Maybe we should listen, and maybe even expend efforts to make changes to become more welcoming for more people that would absolutely *love* to get off of the likes of Reddit, X, Threads, or Facebook?
That's my 2¢ anyway.
I can't believe XMPP is not a standard
It was.
In fact, for about 3 weeks, Facebook and gtalk could exchange message seamlessly and easily over their fed gateway and xmpp.
Seeing a problem with this, FB changed. With it being at least 4.5 weeks since the last complete redesign incompatible with the old, Google also changed to something that sucked.
Since we are on a decentralized platform & many of us care about federation, do yourself a service & read this little history lesson: *How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse)* (archived)
It is a standard, starting at RFC 6120. Everyone can use it today. 😃
Yes, but not open like the e-mail.
Not open? Wat
Technically, whatsapp, telegram, signal, even the chat of some online games are XMPP, but the servers are closed to be able to interact with other ones so they can become a monopoly...
That doesn't mean it isn't an open standard, that means they are using it as a closed system. This isn't a case of XMPP not being open, it's a case of servers using it choosing not to be open. Therefore the problem isn't XMPP not being open, it's services themselves not being open. As an example Reddit uses Matrix in their awful chats function, but you can't message other matrix users there or message reddit users from Matrix. That doesn't make Matrix not open, it means someone is using it in a way that isn't open to others.
Usenet/IRC/BBS sitting in the background like: Am I a joke to you?
IRC was "kinda" federated. You needed to convince a server already in the network to accept your server. But in the early days requirements were quite low.
BBS was not really federated (except Fidonet I guess).
Usenet, I guess it kinda was. But only ISPs were really running NNTP servers. Only they and unis really had the resources to too.
And XMPP (1999).
Oh Jabber the true RCS of the day.
Usenet or Fidonet would be a more apt comparison
Mastodon is objectively more popular than lemmy. But comparing them to email as a whole is a bit deceptive, a better comparison would be Mastodon and Gmail, or ActivityPub and Email.
This used to be true. However in the internet of today, if your email doesn’t come from a Microsoft or a google it will get rejected if the recipient is a Microsoft or google email address. They have taken over.
You CAN do the full list of things to get accepted there. But you only need to fail a SINGLE test to get sent to junk mail jail.
To not be put to junk you need all of the following (oh and this can and will change one day and you'll go straight to junk)
Not sure if I missed any there. It's been a while since I set all this crap up.
You forgot both 'Don't send too much email' and 'Fail to send enough email' as qualifiers, as well.
Which I think is the big thing that hits more people than anything else, since 'too much traffic' and 'not enough traffic' are not defined and so you can easily be caught by one, then the other, then end up in purgatory.
(This is mostly a Microsoft problem rather than a Google problem, but still.)
Also if you're running an email server for others, it takes very little from single individual, like a small webshop newsletter, which enough people manually marks as junk and you're on a block list again. Latest one with microsoft took several days to clear, even if all of their tools and 1st tier support claimed that my IP isn't on a black list.
I've jumped all the hoops and done everything by the book, but that still doesn't mean that any of the big players won't just screw you up because some of their automaton happens to decide so. That's why I'm shutting my small ISP business down, there's no more money to make on that and a ton of customers have moved to the cloud anyways, mostly to microsoft due to their office-suite pricing. It was kind of fun while it lasted, but that ship has sailed.
Yeah, I'm quite sure it's a deliberate activity to dissuade against private email servers. Keep everyone's email "in the club". Once you've got this much working you need a whole suite of tools to deal with the HUGE amount of spam you need to filter. It can be a hell of a lot.
Filtering incoming spam, while not 100% correct, is a pretty straightforward thing to do. Use DNSBL and other lists from spamhaus and it takes care of 90+% of the problem. Incoming spam has not been a huge issue for me, but when people try to send mail to someone in M365 cloud or to Gsuite and they just decide that your server isn't important enough they just block you out and that's it. Trying to circumvent that takes a ton of time and effort and while it can be done it's a huge pain in the rear. And trying to fight your way trough the 1st tier support to someone who actually understands the problem and attempts to fix that while you customers are complaining that "problem with email" is actually affecting on their income is the part I'll happily leave behind.
I'll set up a couple of new VPS servers to host my personal and friends emails, but if they complain that the service I'm paying from my personal pocket isn't what they're after then they're free to switch into whatever they like. And as infrastructure for that is something like 100€/year I'll happily pay it by myself so that no one has an option to say 'I paid for this so you need to fix it' anymore. On commercial case that's obviously not an option and I've had my share of running a business in a very hostile environment.
Yeah and honestly, this is largely a reasonable standard for anyone running an email server. If you don't have SPF, DKIM and DMARC, basically anyone can spoof your emails and you'd be none the wiser. It also makes spam much harder to send without well, sacrificing IP addresses to the many spam lists. I wouldn't be surprised if some people setting up their own mail server were made aware of these things because of being blocked.
I use proton and simplelogin aliases. Both doing fine
Sure there are a few others. What I’m mainly getting at is that you can’t run an email server in your house the same way you can run a lemmy instance and expect those emails to get delivered. You are forced to use someone else’s email service as a backend or google will flag your emails as spam.
If other federated services gain dominance, they will go the same route. And due to the same pressures. (Spam, bad actors, misbehaving servers, etc)
We already see defederation drama.
This really underscores that "The Company Town" is very much alive. Also move over East India Trading Co.
We've let the Internet too few big players. It used to be more diverse, more federated. Now it's just the New TV for Advertisers to shit down your neck.
I'm not even sure if we can go back without inventing new technologies not captured by bureaucratic establishments.
Spammers ruined this not email companies.
I think commenter above talking aboht self hosted
Proton used to have some issues but mega corps had to stop since it was illegal
This is by design. The primary email relays have been captured for snooping. The spam lists are just a tool to solidify "winners" who comply with giving up your data.
yahoo?
I noticed they seem to be intentionally locking out smaller domains and I hope that backfires. Not holding my breath though.
IRC has entered the chat
Irc is not federated, though. Servers don't talk to each other
Networks don't, but many servers are used to create a single network.
Efnet isn't a single server. Freenode isn't a single server, etc.
Nobody point how much Email sucks!
I really wish email had a built-in aliases feature. Like, so you can create unlimited new addresses that just point to your normal inbox. That would help so much with spam, since you could just block individual aliases. I know some email providers have this feature, but usually it's paid. Plus Addressing is also nice, but it does nothing to hide your "real" address. Also I'm disappointed that end-to-end encrypted email is basically never used by normal people.
Dutch tech news site Tweakers.net kept saying that it was too hard... *head desk*
Now if government officials start accepting a fediverse based communication, I will create a separate instance for that and it will be totally safe for work, only used for communications with the government.
Mastadon and Lemmy use the same protocol.
You can even see accounts and posts from Mastodon on Lemmy, and the other way around too.
But yes, email is great.
I've heard it's (currently) impossible to post on Mastodon with a Lemmy account due to how both are differently built, unless you're referring to seeing a Lemmy discussion from Mastodon.
kbin/mbin does have some mastadonesque facilities. So it straddles the line between threadiverse and I dunno what we call the mastadon side.
Mbin will do both but not all servers appear to federate with Mastodon
@P4ulin_Kbana
> I’ve heard it’s (currently) impossible to post on Mastodon with a Lemmy account due to how both are differently built, unless you’re referring to seeing a Lemmy discussion from Mastodon
I'm trying to reply to this with a Mastodon account. I'll be interested to see if it appears in the discussion on Lemmy instances, and if replies to it from Lemmy appear in my @mentions here.
@x00z
It does works 🫡
Well that worked, I can see my reply as a comment on both Lemmy.nz (where I found the thread) and on https://lemmy.eco.br where @P4ulin_Kbana is posting.
Now someone reply, I want to see if this works.
@P4ulin_Kbana @x00z
After email comes matrix. If you include all systems based on matrix, there are hundreds of millions of users already.
This smells like ego projection. These are tools for jobs, they don't have to compete.
What on earth are you talking about?? Of course they don't have to compete. It's a meme. It's meant to be funny, not accurate. What does my ego have to do with anything?
It's alright, it's art. You can't expect it to reach everyone the same way.
IIRC, ð USPS actually almost adopted a policy to just give everyone in ð country ðeir own email address once upon a time.
Firstly, that would be awesome, but imagine the spam.
Secondly, I'm a proponent of thorn, I get it. But ð was almost exclusively used medially and terminally in English. In addition it didn't last nearly as long, and is much less recognizable as a letter in English. Þ was used initially, and is far more commonly seen in English. I get that you're using them for voiced and unvoiced like in Icelandic, but that wasn't so much the convention in English. I'm not against it, I'm asking to be sold on it. Lol. Sell me on why I need eth instead of just using thorn for both voiced and unvoiced, please? I'm willing to be converted.
And third, I'm having trouble finding it, was eth on it's own ever used as a single letter spelling of the, or is that your own addition? I like it. When writing (by hand) notes or things only I'll be reading, I use the þe shorthand that looks like an e cradled in the crook of a y, like was common in colonial America.