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!
The problem is, that email isn’t really decentralised/federated anymore.
It’s impossible to day to setup your own mailserver and have the email accepted by the major email providers (where most of the people are)!
Checkout this article: https://cfenollosa.com/blog/after-self-hosting-my-email-for-twenty-three-years-i-have-thrown-in-the-towel-the-oligopoly-has-won.html
It’s sad, but while email is decentralised in it’s core protocol, it’s execution has become too centralised today. Fortunately, HTML and the web standards are better as we at least still have Firefox (a non-chromium BLINK engine based browser) today. But even there, chrome takes up too much of the market share.
Doesn’t prevent me from doing it.
I send a mail to you and your shitty mail provider blocks it as spam, even though I setup my SPF and DKIM entries correctly? Well that’s your problem, complain to your provider then lmao.
Of course that cannot be applicable to every use case. Sometimes you need a mail to go through in which case I still use GMail or iCloud Mail, unfortunately.
But it became like that because we let it become like that. We should use email as it was intended to be used, and if it doesn’t work, well fuck it. It’s the recipient’s fault for choosing a shitty or “non-compliant” provider.