Well, let me go by example: The strength of E-Mail lies in the fact that its a robust standard that, instead of siloing users into their platforms, brings people together into one single userbase.
Similarly with federation in social media, this makes userbases not compete but collaborate. If I created an ActivityPub-Powered project right now, I'd have to convince nobody to use it and still be part of a community.
One difference however is that social media is public. As the person that runs the server, you do have to put in some measures to make sure that your users are actually feeling safe. The most extreme of these measures is defederation, where you just completely cut off another server, but there's also other ways to limit other servers, like for example, hiding their accounts by default in say the "federated" feed in Mastodon and co.
@boogetyboo there's still a good chance you're using your Internet Service Provider's DNS.
Not only does this mean its super trivial for them to block things they don't want you to access, but this also means they can see (and they probably log) everything you do; no good for privacy or freely accessible info
Try switching to something like quad9, and reboot your devices after to make sure they've cleared their DNS cache
PS:
You can just add dns.quad9.net to Settings > Network > Private DNS on Android if you don't want the app.
The fact that you're not even noticing the federation shows how effective it is ;)
You're probably browsing communities that aren't on Lemmy.world often without realising, I'm here replying to you from wetdry.world (a mastodon instance), and the OP also doesn't come from Lemmy.world
The cool thing about this is that no single server, company, or entity in general gets to decide over the wider fediverse, because everything is spread out and shared between thousands of independent servers. This is completely opposite to what traditional social media services have built.
@unterzicht that IS it's use. It is primarily used in show-off posts where people present their systems so that people in the replies can get a quick glance on what they're running.
The reason this is big news is because neofetch was by far the biggest project of it's kind
@max641 a friend of mine (nift4) is working on something called Neo-Wellbeing, but I don't know how far it is at this moment in time; apart from "it isn't ready yet" at least
@Benjamin its basically automatic e-mail in the sense that it doesn't matter what e-mail provider you're on but you can still contact each other across mail providers
Here you can substitute mail providers with social media platforms, and it happens ✨automagically✨, without anyone doing anything
To put this into perspective, I see hundreds of posts that aren't by people that signed up on wetdry.world on my home feed, and I can still interact with them, yet wetdry.world is my home.
No I am not saying accounts are portable, but the content is. Your mastodon app has no idea how to handle Lemmy, and your Lemmy app has no idea how to handle Mastodon
BUT the servers that you're signing up to? They know how to share the content between eachother. That is because they all use the ActivityPub standard to exchange posts and account data.
I'm writing to you from mastodon (hence all my replies start by pinging you)
Lemmy does format some things in lemmy-specific ways, but other than that all our posts can be viewed anywhere, and I can slap any lemmy thread into my mastodon UI to reply to whoever I want
Also...someone OTHER THAN ME linked this? That's rare
Matrix is currently in a bit of a weird place as funding is low. Its alright, but dont expect Telegram-level UX. Element is also re-making their mobile apps as part of Element X.