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!
Well yes, if you simplify pretty much everything online enough it becomes “send message to this address”.
With email, that’s pretty much it.
With ActivityPub, after being received that message gets federated out to all servers that have a subscriber of whatever service the message was sent to.
The difference is more about implementation, conceptually. Email is just far more one-on-one
What about usenet?
Good point. Can we all go back to it?
Not really… Google “bought” it out back in the early 2000s and took over the archives. And turned it into its groups product.
This is… either simplified to be confusing or a big misunderstanding of kind of everything. Google bought DejaNews an online Usenet text archive. Usenet still exists right now, and there are still at least 5 or more major Usenet server providers you could sign up with today, but most charge for access.