Hold out your hand to see if they shake it. That's protocol.
this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2026
4 points (70.0% liked)
No Stupid Questions
48380 readers
1184 users here now
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
A protocol is just the rules to do something. Doesn't matter of it's a human language, a machine language, cleaning a room, driving a car, ...
It's the rules for how we interact. Like shake hands and introduce yourself. Many protocols literally have "handshake" stages.
I also like as an example the rule of not facing your back to the king/queen.
This is the original meaning of the word.
you can replace the word 'protocol' with 'set of rules' in almost any context and it still makes sense.
A protocol is a shared set of expectations that allow two or more things to communicate. It says "I will announce myself in this way" and "these are the responses you should expect to this request" and "here's the list of all the things I know how to do", and if we both follow the protocol, then we both understand what's going to happen when we communicate.
For a five year old I'd keep it super simple and personally relatable and say it's like a language that two people speak. Except it's a computer language that websites speak (I often say websites instead of servers even when speaking to adults).
So like Facebook and Gmail can't talk to eachother, but Gmail and Hotmail can. (You can probably come up with better examples.)
Great way to explain it at any age.
It's just language that computers use to talk to other computers.
Consider this : Jabber and gmail/Hotmail do not speak the same language ?
But jabber and WhatsApp can ??
Protocols help computers know how to behave together. It's like how you know that you make your voice go up to ask a question, so that I know I'm supposed to answer you.
How about a computer and a mobile phone ?
A mobile phone is a kind of computer.
A (modern) mobile phone is very similar to a computer, the main difference is the shape and what software it runs by default
It is a computer. Computer is a very general term.
They're the same with different connections
A protocol is a set of rules that a group of people have agreed on to make it easier to talk to each other. I shut up when you talk and listen to what you say. I speak again when you have finished and then it's your turn to listen. That's a simple example of a protocol.
IP is more rules than that but it allows computers to talk to each other without having to exchange contract information first, like people do with phone numbers.
Let that sink in before you tackle Activity Pub.
C3PO is a protocol droid, and can "speak" many languages.
Computers use protocols like a language to understand each other when they connect
Yeah but I have no use for him if he can't understand the binary language of moisture vaporators
Start with non-computer protocols. What's the protocol at a restaurant?
Patron: Open the door and enter. Wait 1.
If host currently busy Restaurant (Host): please wait. I will be right with you.
If host currently not present Restaurant (anyone): please wait, the host will be right with you.
If wait 1 times out Patron: excuse me, we'd like a table.
If host available and not busy Restaurant (Host): Hello and welcome. Wait 2.
if wait 2 times out Restaurant (Host): how many are in your party?
Patron: Hello. We would like a table .
Or think about parliamentary procedure for bringing a motion to vote and voting on it.
These are protocols. They are all around us.
Computer networking protocols are so named because they are analogous. They define how to exchange information to accomplish a specific task. For IP, it's a protocol for routing information packets across an unknown number of computers to a destination computer. For TCP, it's a protocol for how a computer should send information packets and how a computer who is receiving those packets should acknowledge them.
Basic manners and politeness is a loose protocol of sorts. The following is a basic exchange between two people using please to request something, a response, followed by thank you and you're welcome to wrap up the exchange. We do it that way because that's the polite way of doing things, in other words it's the expected protocol.
Can I please have X?
Yes you may.
Thank you!
You're welcome!
Rules
I guess I would explain it as an agreed upon way of talking to each other, say you decide you want to text, or call, or send a card. A protocol is like that. It's not the data just the transmission method. A protocol controls the data stream, the hand shaking (when it is OK to start sending data, which port, where to send it). A data packet sent using a protocol is like a letter, with a sender, intended receiver, stamp (signature, key, CRC, etc.).
Computers are really dumb, so when one computer wants to talk to another computer, they need an established set of rules about how each message will be sent and what to do with it when it gets received.
For IP, it's mostly about how data is packaged and shipped. It has rules about how much data can be sent in a single message, some information about where the message is going and where it came from, whether or not they expect a reply, and then finally the block of data itself.
However, inside that block of data, there will be some more information about what that data is, so that the receiving computer knows what to do with it. This is where applications like activitypub do their work.