this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2023
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Technology

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Email is the oldest Federated service. (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago by nodsocket@lemmy.world to c/technology@beehaw.org
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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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[–] iMeddles@fedia.io 6 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Its a reasonable analogy, but were not there yet. While mastodon instances will talk to mastodon instances, and pixelfed instances will talk to pixelfed instances, and kbin instances will talk to kbin instances, at the moment the intercommunication between apps is a real issue. Imagine postfix wouldn't reliably talk to exchange servers, that would be a real barrier to adoption. I'm hopeful this will get sorted, but were on the bleeding edge at the moment.

[–] cih@beehaw.org 6 points 1 year ago

You are misinformed. All ActivityPub-enabled services can talk to each other. For example: You can post a comment on this thread via Mastodon.

[–] shortwavesurfer@monero.house 6 points 1 year ago

What do you mean? I can talk to mastodon, kbin, pixelfed, peertube, etc users from inside lemmy and same with my mastodon

[–] luna@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

This is 1. not true, as shortwavesurfer says and 2. not an equivalent comparison. This would be like saying that mastodon doesn't talk to glitch or pleroma. But it does, so even if this comparison was equivalent, it'd be false.