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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] 45 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

There needs to be a directory that is universal.