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!
This is 1. not true, as shortwavesurfer says and 2. not an equivalent comparison. This would be like saying that mastodon doesn’t talk to glitch or pleroma. But they do, so even if this comparison was equivalent, it’d be false.