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216

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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[–] swnt@feddit.de 8 points 1 year ago

While I can understand your sentiment, the problem is that many people simply didn't care, and hence they never demanded that from their providers or moved away when they added such anti-competitite policies.

For the large majority of humans, even understanding what the hell the internet is and what computers do is still a mystery. I can understand, that for most people, it was difficult enough to get used to email and cloud stuff in the first place.

But now, over the past decade, many people have often experienced the problems of corporate-owned non-decentralised services. (Twitter, EverNote, etc.)

And with these experiences, it's much easier to convince and have people move over to alternatives.

Again. I understand why you're 'angry'. And I feel that too. But I also see, that many people don't care and simply take the most comfortable options as they don't see the risks in lock-in.