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!
I was explaining it to a friend today, and I decided that Lemmy is a LOT like the old FIDOnet message network that was used on BBS’s.
Except it doesn’t take six days for the reply to come back. (I say this ironically, replying six days after your comment.)