We have Lemmy.world, Lemmy.ml, beehaw.org, I think even yiffit.net. If I log in using wefwef it asks me where I want to login. And when I make a new account using another instance, it says ”… Lemmy is federated, so you can interact with everything on lemmy.ml even if you’re registered on a different instance.“ So if I’m registered on lemmy.world, how can I interact with lemmy.ml?
This “It’s just like email” makes no sense at all to me. My email is nothing like Lemmy. It is the most confusing description I have ever heard.
You have a gmail address. Your friend has a yahoo address. Your other friend has an outlook address.
It doesn’t matter at all because they all work together. That’s what they mean
But I can’t read any of their emails so it isn’t like email at all.
But I can’t read any of their emails so it isn’t like email at all.
But if you both subscribe to the same mailing list you will both receive the same message.
I’m confident that “mailing lists” are not a thing most people will know about or understand today, and for a lot of people “email” and “gmail” are completely synonymous terms. A lot of people will have never interacted with an @yahoo account, I wasn’t aware they were even still in business.
It is “just like email” in a sense you can send email from your gmail to someone using yahoo, hotmail or even their own self hosted server and it still gets delivered despite all those different servers. And that’s where analogy of similarity to email ends.
I can (could) post to reddit with Boost, my friend uses Apolo, this other guy uses RIF. To the layman what’s the difference between my instance, your instance, wefwef, jerboa, etc. The general public don’t know about email servers any more than Lemmy instances.
Well, yes, but no.
Analogy of friends using Boost, Apolo, RiF is like accessing their emails with Outlook, the other guy with Thunderbird and the last one within browser through webmail. It doesn’t say much, just the piece of software used to connect to the server.
In case of Reddit, there was just one server/entity - Reddit. It’s like if you and all your friends had (for example) gmail. You could still use Outlook or Thunderbird or any other mail app to access it, but all of you would communicate throughout google server - gmail to gmail. And there would be no option to communicate with someone having hotmail, fastmail or any other provider.
But when you send email (from any of those applications) it connects and delivers to any other email server. Be it gmail, hotmail, yahoo, zoho, someones garage server, or whatever else. And this is the same here. It doesn’t really matter whether you sign up at lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, beehaw.org, lemm.ee or sh.itjust.works - you can still access, view and communicate with people from different servers. Just like you can send emails between different providers.
So in general, normal non-tech-savvy people should semi-randomly pick any instance they happen to stumble upon and they should be fine.
What part of the comparison confuses you?
I can’t think of how it is even close to the same as email other that both Lemmy and email use the @ symbol.
If I send an email to a friend, no one else can see it. That is a note between him and me. The comparison is perplexing.
The analogy isn’t meant to reflect who receives the message, but how communication interacts.
Each lemmy/federated instance uses a prefix and a suffix to create a name. So for example, I’m Melpomene@kbin.social here, where Melpomene is me and kbin.social is where I reside. This is similar to email because it works similarly… I might be Melpomene on Gmail, but my actual user name reflects both me (Melpomene) and the email instance I call home (gmail.com.)
If you want a specific analogy to messaging, though… when you send a message to a lemmy community, you’re basically responding to a distribution list. nostupidquestions@lemmy.world is akin a distribution list, the distribution list is (technically) visible to anyone on the instance, so anyone can see the message. If you’re on a federated instance that allows private messages, though, sending to an individual user would still function like email in that only the person messaged would see it.
Edit: The comparison is not exact, granted. It’s meant to de-mystify the prefix/suffix format of federation, not to offer a one to one comparison to email.
Another way of looking at it is cross platform videogames where Kbin.social is playstation Lemmy.world is xbox and a third one would be Nintendo Switch. If the game has a chat feature what one person posts from xbox would appear for the playstation players and visa versa. Federating is basically when they first connect to each other to become multi platform.