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!
Not really… Google “bought” it out back in the early 2000s and took over the archives. And turned it into its groups product.
Google bought the company Deja and got their software, which turned into Google groups, and also got their Usenet archive.
They didn’t buy Usenet itself (which would be like buying “email”), and it is still very much alive, but it has changed, and most people have moved their preferred place to have discussions elsewhere.
Note: I was going to say “would be like buying a cloud”, but Google Cloud is a thing, so…yeah.
I was relying heavily on the quotes around “bought”. A large amount of Usenet had consolidated under Deja which went to Google. While there is still some remnants around. What it was before is no where near the same as it is now.
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.