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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[–] xuu@lemmy.sdf.org 28 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The OG federated social media was Usenet.

[–] davefischer@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

And... usenet messages are basically email messages with a few extra header lines. The format is otherwise the exact same.

[–] xuu@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 1 year ago

Much like how this is just ActivityPub with a few extra metadata to thread them.