Sometime this month, Reddit will go public at a valuation of $6.5bn. Select Redditors were offered the chance to buy stock at the initial listing price, which it hasn’t announced yet but is expected to be in the range of $31-34 per share. Regardless of the actual price,
Will we ever stop referring to the Web as “the Internet”?
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.
BitTorrent is a pretty big part of the Internet though.
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.
The thing is: what people call the Internet is not the infrastructure. It’s the content on the Internet. There’s the technical term “Internet” and there’s the coloquial term. Unfortunately, engineers and scientists suck at naming and explaining things at the level that the general population can understand. So “the Internet” became synonymous with “content on the Internet”, be it Web content, torrents, bbs and what not.
No.
Whats the difference?
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.
Totally serious. Never knew there is a difference. Thanks for the explanation.
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.
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.
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.
Given there’s people in this thread incorrectly using “internet” instead of “web”… Probably never.