this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2023
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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!

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[–] bdonvr@lemmy.rogers-net.com 3 points 1 year ago (9 children)

Well yes, if you simplify pretty much everything online enough it becomes "send message to this address".

With email, that's pretty much it.

With ActivityPub, after being received that message gets federated out to all servers that have a subscriber of whatever service the message was sent to.

The difference is more about implementation, conceptually. Email is just far more one-on-one

[–] vodnik@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (6 children)
[–] jmcs@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Good point. Can we all go back to it?

[–] vodnik@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

I predict that’s exactly what generation alpha is going to do. Gen Z is already using y2k camcorders as cameras. It’s gonna be a trend.

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