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!
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.
Could you elaborate on that?
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.
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
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.
Because they use fone number to register for things instead