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A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

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Email is the oldest Federated service. (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year 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.