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You don't need to understand federation to use Mastodon.

If you want to comment on a post on a different instance, you need to know what is going on at some trivial level to get the addressing/login right. It's not obvious, and some instances have surprising restrictions that make life more complicated. That's probably what is meant here by "understanding federation". The zero institution of federation is... The thing is broken up into multiple parts.

Most of the time you'd come across a post on a different instance in your home feed which just takes a click to reply to, the same as any other post.

To get to the point of having a "home feed" you have to choose an instance. It's not like Usenet where there was a default local NNRP server, no decision to be made

Having a basic grasp of what federation means is about as important in Mastodon as knowing what a "group" was on Usenet: it's the first concept one needs to learn.

I wonder why the fediverse decided to deviate from the email syntax.

It's anecdotal, but when I tried to push for ActivityPub the major source of confusion was the prepending @: once I started aliasing <account>@<instance> to @<account>@<instance> everybody stopped asking.

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