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

submitted 1 year ago by nodsocket@lemmy.world to c/technology

75 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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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[–] maibrl@feddit.de 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Could you elaborate on that?

[–] jmp242@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] maibrl@feddit.de 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] jmp242@sopuli.xyz 2 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.

[–] zergling_man@lemmy.perthchat.org 1 points 1 year ago

Because they use fone number to register for things instead