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!
Fair. It’s not the same but the tools are there. Anyone can set up their own root servers. All that’s needed is a way for people to conveniently opt in / stop visiting Reddit. There’s no reason there couldn’t be (and in fact, there probably are) shadow root servers used by distributed organizations.