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!
I think the analogy is great - but analogies only work if the person is more familiar with the analogy than the actual topic - if the understanding is the same or less, it doesn’t function well.
I mean, in a lot of ways the fediverse is reinventing Usenet too, but if you don’t know the technical details of Usenet, that analogy doesn’t help you either.