Lemmy is definitely different from how mailing lists work in practice - much faster to get updates on, more ergonomic, etc., but in theory - could SMTP, IMAP, and a bit of ingenuity be used to turn a mailing list into a Lemmy-like interface for comments, links, etc?
I just had the idea of making a mailing list-based ActivityPub host lol, but it would probably be much slower than Lemmy in just about every way because of protocol overhead.
@nostupidquestions
@zenithseeker
ActivityPub have supports for multiple type of objects, and actions on those objects. Like liking (or upvoting) a post.
But beside that, it’s just about the same. You can absolutely build a functioning bridge that would translate emails into ActivityPub and then subscribe to it from Lemmy instance. There are a lot of bridges (XMPP, Twitter mirrors, Nostr, etc.)