@ridt
With all due respect, that is not an explainer, that is a conflater. It conflates federated network the technology with federated network the concept, and put in some positive words to make fediverse people feel good.
To wit, different datacenter providers around the world exchange YouTube video data. Is YouTube a "federated network"?
@kemuri @ridt Fediverse is closer to a physical world federated network than a closed ecosystem like the YouTube example. No one but Google can join the YouTube ecosystem, the protocol is non-public and the direction is driven by a central authority. This is in contrast to a post office, or Fediverse, where participants agree on common rules, but the details are up to each instance.
@monad_cat @ridt Where is the protocol for opening a USPS post office? Do DHL, UPS, FedEx, USPS interconnect with each other? If they do, where and how?
These questions prevent me from seeing a postal network as analogous to a Fediverse network.
Pardon me for the US-centric formulation of the questions, but if you know about similar situations in other countries, I am all ears. USPS is the US state-owned postal service, while DHL, UPS, FedEx are private shipping companies.
@kemuri @ridt There is an international post union (https://www.upu.int/en/home) that federates all the different national posts. The US private companies are not it’s members, but for most of the world we have public postal companies which speak the same protocol between each other.
This allows me to go to my post office and send a postcard to Brazil, which will likely travel along a route similar to PL->DE->PT->BR, with each of these postal companies handling their own part of the delivery route.
@monad_cat
Thank you so much for the link to UPU, that explains so much more than the "explainer". So if I am the head of government of a new country, I can create a new postal service and operate according to the UPU standard, which enables me to interoperate with other national postal services. My citizens may emigrate and others may immigrate. That indeed then is a federated network. Great! If the "explainer" explains like that, I'd praise its clarity.
But it goes on with "federated networks have been the default for human communications from the earliest days". That threw me way off, and now I know why. UPU is only established in 1874, and UPU Standards for interoperation seem to be only 20 some years old. The oldest such international organization being the International Telecommunication Union, it really only started with the advent of telegraph.
Federated network doesn't go back all the way "from the earliest days". It is a modern innovation, and I love it for that. If I discard the second paragraph, the first paragraph makes all the sense it needs already. Thank you again for this revelation.
@kemuri @monad_cat
well ...there's always Libraries.
We could look at their purpose as essentially staying the same throughout their (long) history changing focus as they developed new technologies which affected their patrons/societies and then back to them in a feedback loop.
We've just got to talk to some Systems Librarians to get their long view blend of networks & human based goals.