Translations:What people usually tell you about the Fediverse/4/en

Everybody knows you don't need to use the same email provider to communicate via email.
You can send a mail from riseup.net to gmail.com and the other way around.
That's about the same way that "federation" in the Fediverse works.
Federation just means that different or decentralized servers or instances can communicate with each other via a protocol.
Just like email uses POP, IMAP or SMTP protocols for federation, the Fediverse mostly uses ActivityPub.