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What's the point of federation?
(lemmy.world)
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The main federated service that pretty-much all Internet users use is email. It's also been around for a long time, and it's much more popular than other old federated services like IRC. So email is a well-understood example of how federation works in practice.
If you use Gmail and you decide that Google is evil, you can switch to Hotmail or any number of other providers, or even run your own mail server, and you can still send email to people who use Gmail.
That helps keep instance owners honest. You've never heard of Gmail and AOL and Hotmail and MIT all getting into a bun-fight over who's evil and cutting off federation with each other, because that doesn't happen. Doing so would piss off their own users, because people on Gmail expect to be able to get email from their mom on AOL and their buddy on Hotmail and the recruiter at the job they're applying to, without interference from Google.