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!
I mean, I wouldn’t even really agree that Email is far more one-on-one.
Email newsletters and mailing lists are relatively known and are essentially one-to-many as well. If you think about with this angle, a post on a community is not very different from a post in a mailing list.
The main “benefit” to people for these communities vs mailing lists is online archives for later searching. Depending on how things go, I can certainly also entertain wanting Mailing lists back.