It’s not rocket science but if we’re being honest about it, it’s not exactly an easy concept either. Going from centralised to decentralised for a social network is not an easy idea especially when one isn’t familiar with federation.

For example, at first I was confused because I’d browse a community on lemmy.ml, I’d want to hit subscribe, but then my account is on lemmy.world.

The fact that the website “moves” while I’m reading a post, doesn’t help either.

I had to get a better grip with defederation too. So, on one instance you see 4 comments, but another instance has 5. Because one of the instances doesn’t federate (at least that’s how I understand it now). Or maybe it’s just lag?

Anyway what I’m getting at is I understand why people say it’s complicated and I for one wouldn’t have bothered to get familiar with these concepts if reddit wasn’t going kaboom.

Not worth it unless you use it for automation and personal notifications. You’ll have to wrestle with google, microsoft and others to accept your mailserver. But if you do want to try, I recommend mail-in-a-box.