I was struggling to wrap my head around how federated social media works until I realized that email has basically been doing the same thing for 30 years. Different email servers are like instances of a federated network. You can send emails to people from within a single server or you can send emails to people on any other mail server. Your email address is a username followed by an ‘@’ and the server address, just like on Lemmy. Email is a decentralized service I’ve been using the whole time!

  • Hazelnoot [she/her]@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    Email is my go-to example when explaining fedi to unfamiliar people. Its especially accessible to non-technical users because almost everyone has sent an email to someone with a different provider.