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!

  • AtomHeartFather@ka.tet42.org
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    1 year ago

    I was explaining it to a friend today, and I decided that Lemmy is a LOT like the old FIDOnet message network that was used on BBS’s.

    • Troy@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      Except it doesn’t take six days for the reply to come back. (I say this ironically, replying six days after your comment.)