this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2025
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It’s an open source project that is like a Swiss Army knife for, primarily http/https, connections.
I use it daily for scripting, monitoring and automation.
@porn_was_never_the_real_issue@lemmynsfw.com l often come across this phrase, Swiss Army knife..... What does it mean actually ??
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_Army_knife
A swiss army knife is a single tool that contains a number of other smaller tools that you can use in many different circumstances.
Curl is a metaphorical "swiss army knife" for connecting to computers. There are many protocols to connect to different kinds of computers running different kinds of software and curl allows one to easily connect to many of them.
@borf@lemmynsfw.com thanks. I really need to understand what protocols actually are.
@porn_was_never_the_real_issue@lemmynsfw.com
Think of a protocol like a language; if you just blurt out sounds no one will understands, but if you make sounds that correspond to an already agreed upon meaning, it becomes communications.
The same thing is true for sending 1s and 0s; they are meaningless unless the other end understands them and a protocol is "the agreement" both ends use to communicate.
Why?
A protocol is like a language. It just lets two computers know how to talk to each other. That's it.
@borf@lemmynsfw.com wow.... But l'm on my android phone........
@porn_was_never_the_real_issue@lemmynsfw.com
Wikipedia works on phones. I'm on an Android phone. Why do you keep pinging that person? This looks like harassment/trolling.
Edit: are you confused because I said "computers?" Your phone is a computer.
Different federated platforms talking to each other will look like this sometimes. In this case it's a microblogging platform talking to a threaded conversation platform. It's just a quirk of federation in general.
Well, that's horrifying -.-
@confusedpuppy@lemmy.dbzer0.com probably an example regarding how curl works ??🤓🤓🤓
@porn_was_never_the_real_issue@lemmynsfw.com @borf@lemmynsfw.com
curl https://google.com/If you run this, you will see the HTML for google.com printed to your screen.
I don't have much experience with curl. From what I understand, it's an old but constantly maintained command line tool. If you type
curl https://www.google.com/in your terminal of choice, you should get a text display in return of google's search page. That's if thecurlcommand is installed on your system, which it most likely would be.You won't be able to interact with it since it's in text but you can see how the page has been written in the HTML language before it gets rendered into the website you would normally see in a web browser.
When it comes to terminal commands, I find it helpful to do web searches using
linux <command name>. For examplelinux curland that will lead me to many sites that help explain the command and give multiple examples of how to use the command.Once you get more experienced with using a terminal, using the command options
--helpor-hwill give you information that could help you use the command. For examplecurl --helpThere's also manual pages, or man pages that give a more technical look at commands within your terminal of choice. You can access them with
man <command name>. Example:man curl.In the case of federation, every platform that is using federation is using a communication protocol called ActivityPub. Simplified, it functions like email but instead of private emails, it's transferring public social media content. Microbloggers and threaded conversations can communicate with each other using ActivityPub but the information exchanged between the two platforms is slightly different. That's how we get quirks like this when two different ActivityPub platforms communicate with each other.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_protocol
Read this @TheracAriane@thebrainbin.org
@borf@lemmynsfw.com thanks 😊 😊 😊
@porn_was_never_the_real_issue@lemmynsfw.com http/https connections means ?
hypertext transfer protocol and hypertext transfer protocol secure. it's the basic network protocol of the modern internet. hypertext can be thought of as being html (hypertext markup language) though other hypertext specifications do exist. hypertext just means documents with links to other documents.
you know how when you copy a url (universal resource location) from your web browser it always has
httporhttpsat the start of it? that's because your web browser is connecting to an external server somewhere via the hypertext transfer protocol.cURL can connext to nearly any server via nearly any standard protocol. it's commonly used for validating connection information and downloading files
It's the protocol most computers use to show websites. In an internet address like https://google.com/, the https:// is the protocol. Different protocols have different features and purposes, but http/https are some of the most common.
@borf@lemmynsfw.com l need to explore this a lot more. Can you give me some more leads on this ?
@porn_was_never_the_real_issue@lemmynsfw.com
First, tell me why you need to know. And please stop pinging that person, it's really rude to ping someone so many times when not responding to them.
they're not on the threadiverse, they're on mastodon where the threading works differently. their software is doing that automatically
Maddening
🤷 it's kind of just a function of thah activity pub is loosy goosy about how and what to do with it. end of the day it's the threadiverse that's weird and we need to just kind of accept these lumps until lemmy/piefed/mbin devs and mastodon/misskey/whatever devs all get on an issue and decide how best to do this