Gmail is an email service. Like the fediverse, email is federated.

By changing your email provider, do you really lose anything? You can still contact your friends, contacts and even various customer suports. You also can recieve emails from popular social media apps. If you degoogle from atleast one Google app, maybe Gmail could be the easiest and least life changing one.

While, Youtube could easilly be one of the most difficult to degoogle from. Not like literally but emotionally. Like deep down you know you can find mostly all you might need on something like Peertube but not all the entertainment media like on Youtube. You will also become a social outcast if peertube is the only app you use. You might not understand channels people mention in day to day talk from youtube or references.

If you use exclusively fediverse apps and sites, Chrome could be almost just as easy to replace as gmail, longterm. However If you use Youtube it won’t surprise me that Youtube downgrades your performance and user experience in what ever means neccesary on competing browsers.

  • lemmyvore@feddit.nl
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    1 year ago

    Federation is when two or more distinct networks interact through a common protocol. Email systems are all part of the same store-and-forward model.

    You can say that email is federated with newsgroups but email is not federated within itself. A system with multiple instances that use the same implementation is called distributed. Federation means hopping across networks of distributed systems with different implementations.

    Example 1: people think that Lemmy is a federated system. On its own it’s not. It’s federated because it interacts with other systems (Mastodon, Kbin etc.) If the others didn’t exist then Lemmy would simply be a distributed system, not federated.

    Example 2: Bluesky is not federated even though it’s distributed and technically capable of federation.

    • progandy@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      You could say that email is federated, there are multiple implementations of mail servers.