you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]sawboss[S] 5 insightful - 2 fun5 insightful - 1 fun6 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

tl;dr It means people can communicate across different networks without necessarily "subscribing" to those networks. It also means a centralized authority can't block or shape such communication. From the wiki article:

In networking systems, to be federated means users are able to send messages from one network to the other. This is not the same as having a client that can operate with both networks, but interacts with both independently. For example, in 2009, Google allowed GMail users to log in to their AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) accounts from GMail. One could not send messages from GTalk accounts or XMPP (which Google/GTalk is federated with—XMPP lingo for federation is s2s, which Facebook and MSN Live's implementations do not support[3]) to AIM screen names, nor vice versa.[4] In May 2011, AIM and Gmail federated, allowing users of each network to add and communicate with each other.

https://infogalactic.com/info/Federation_(information_technology)

If you think censorship on social media is bad, you should care about this.