I think what we are seeing is a taste of what could be, as the technology improves and the UIs of the clients become more friendly and add features to leverage the tech.
We are watching it all happen in real time. Problem is everyone wants a polished experience day one. It’s going to turn a lot of people off, but I’m not sure there’s anyway around it. Once refined, this is the kind of tech could be key to the people controlling the future of social media.
> I can log into Mastodon and search and find the user I created on lemmy. I can also search, follow and look at the posts @technology@beehaw.org. All from my Mastodon app/account.
So is your user registered at lemmy? Or at lemmy.world? Is there a difference?
And you can view the posts at @technology@beehaw.org - but do you have to have a separate beehaw account to post?
Well, you could, but Beehaw basically blocked Lemmy.world. But otherwise the metaphor holds true. If you make an account on some other instance, you can subscribe to communities on Beehaw, post on Beehaw, and reply to users on Beehaw posts. When doing so your username, instead of being e.g. "mahogany", changes to "mahagony@[LEMMYSERVER]". That's how you can tell who is a user of that particular server.
The fediverse is set up kind of the same way. You can interact with people if you know how to find their account, the address of which is formatted similarly to an email address. You and whoever you're interacting with don't have to have accounts on the same server to communicate with each other.
It's like if you opened up a reddit thread while logged into your hacker news account, and decided to respond to a comment in the reddit thread. Federation would give you that ability. Your username, in that thread, would be something like "cdelsolar@news.ycombinator.com" or something like that, to show that you were posting from a different server.
You have an account on one server eg. foo@bar.com. People on example.com smallreddit will see you're posting from bar.com (ie. your username will look something like foo@bar.com). The bar.com server's UI may expose stuff from other servers to bar.com users, and the reverse.
Defederation means severing those visitation rights and other interop between two small twitters or two small reddits, something Mastodon servers use rather liberally.
In practice, what ends up happening is that at least Mastodon has hideous degrees of ideological conformity via defedding and general woke modding, and there's essentially standalone dissident "witches' covens" and an archipelago of servers whose maintainers tend to think different politics are de facto evil. I could hardly use the same account to see what progressives, gendercrits and various strands of the right are talking about the way I can on Twitter, for example, because of the defederation moats that have been erected.