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!

  • zergling_man@lemmy.perthchat.org
    8·
    2 years ago

    Surprisingly I’ve heard that the email analogy is not very useful for explaining federation. But I guess not that surprising with people <=18. They’ve probably never even had an email address outside of school provisions or whatever.

      • jmp242English
        2·
        2 years ago

        I’ve been told people under {some age, maybe 35 now?} only use e-mail at work. I’m not actually sure how this is really possible, because you need e-mail to get all those “social accounts”, as well as a lot of Government stuff (like DMV stuff), Banking and more, but it’s what I’ve been told.

        • maibrl@feddit.deEnglish
          1·
          2 years ago

          I was more asking about the analogy not being good. I don’t know anything specific besides the analogy at the moment, so I’d love to know why it might fall short

          • jmp242English
            1·
            2 years ago

            I think the analogy is great - but analogies only work if the person is more familiar with the analogy than the actual topic - if the understanding is the same or less, it doesn’t function well.

            I mean, in a lot of ways the fediverse is reinventing Usenet too, but if you don’t know the technical details of Usenet, that analogy doesn’t help you either.