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!

  • TheYang@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    you wouldn’t even relly need to find one consistent way, just identify the way servers do it, and have a list of supported methods.

    let’s say there are implenetations a,b,c, and d
    if let’s say google supported b,c and d, and apple b, and hotmal c and d, only hotmail-apple traffic would be unencrypted as they can’t agree on a common method.

    pretty sure that’s how TLS (i.e. https) works.