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’ve seen people scoffing at the idea that federated services can become popular due to how hard it is to understand, but it’s actually quite easy when you think of it using this analogy.
Yes, but the sign up prices can be annoying. I tried signing up at a bunch of different instances and it never went through. I’m addition finding communities is a little painful. But all in in a big fan of it.
Finding communities can be painful indeed, and there are a few other wrinkles that I hope will be ironed out over time, like having the ability to hard delete posts and comments and having a setting to disable autorefresh.
There needs to be a directory that is universal.
Wow, this makes a ton of sense and I had never thought about it. Thanks for the example!
Exactly! I think someone else on another thread when trying to explain the fediverse to someone used how e-mail works as a comparison and it just made it click and make sense for me! It’s going to be my go-to way to explain it to someone now.
It’s a good analogy for how accounts are created, but the analogy breaks down when considering what happens when you send an email. When you send an email, you send it to specific people on specific domains. With the Fediverse, you post it to your domain, and anyone who wants to take a look, can.
It’s not so much of an analogy, email actually is a federated technology just like ActivityPub is and ActivityPub works a lot like email and has audience targeting fields which map onto the same audience targeting fields that email has (
to,cc, etc.) these activities aren’t always publicly available, although they can be and they are delivered to another users inbox (although if public they can be read from a user’s outbox).
This is exactly the analogy I use even trying to explain fediverse to normies.
Email is my go-to example when explaining fedi to unfamiliar people. Its especially accessible to non-technical users because almost everyone has sent an email to someone with a different provider.
Does each lemmy server need to constantly pull and store all activity from all other instances? That’d be the huge difference here, but I’m not sure how the linking works exactly. Imagine your tiny email server having to sync with all activity on gmail…
The details don’t match but the overall architecture is similar. Obviously since email is just messaging between two parties you don’t have to download anything, the server just waits until a message comes in.
Telegraph has entered the chat.
Also, DNS, and routing protocols. The Internet was designed for it. Walled gardens are an affectation of capital used to create the artificial scarcities it then exploits.
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