I was struggling to wrap my head around how federated social media works until I realized that email has basically been doing the same thing for 30 years. Different email servers are like instances of a federated network. You can send emails to people from within a single server or you can send emails to people on any other mail server. Your email address is a username followed by an ‘@’ and the server address, just like on Lemmy. Email is a decentralized service I’ve been using the whole time!
Fair. It’s not the same but the tools are there. Anyone can set up their own root servers. All that’s needed is a way for people to conveniently opt in / stop visiting Reddit. There’s no reason there couldn’t be (and in fact, there probably are) shadow root servers used by distributed organizations.
There are federated aspects of the DNS protocol. My secondaries are hosted by other people’s primaries and I secondary for them. But yes, there is one big defacto network that we all have to belong to.