Just under half of men aged 18-29 voted for Trump, and who knows how bad that number would be if young people actually bothered to vote. The idea that conservatives are just old people who got theirs is just a skewed view from young progressives with conservative parents.
Gen X was the age of hippies, protesting the Vietnam war, anti nuclear protests, and so on. In many ways they were more progressive than the current young generations.
Millenials are growing up to be just as conservative as gen x. Gen z is already turning towards conservatism (probably because progressives really suck at social media which is shaping young minds to an extreme extent). The only difference between gen x/y/z/alpha is that x and y have had more time to accumulate wealth and therefore possess more power.
Don’t blame society’s issues on people because of something simple like their age or their race. No problem is as simple as that.
Email federates across providers. As do voice calls, texts, and RCS. The telecom industry was forced to do some kind of federation the moment different countries (with different monopolies) started needing to call each other. The terrible, terrible signalling systems that made this federation possible still allow for foreign governments to track human rights activists and journalists across the border today. The modern telecoms federation system is better, but it’ll only protect you when everyone in the world stops doing 2G and that’ll take another decade at least.
Back when newsgroups existed in serious numbers (not for piracy reasons) they were a major federated discussion forum. IRC chats were and still are federated, though not many interconnected IRC channels remain.
There used to be this “OpenID” standard that was designed to be federated. Basically, you registered an account with any identity server, and with the URL to that server you could log in to any service that used federated OpenID. That way, websites didn’t need to bother registering passwords and such, and you only needed to enter your password with an identity server of your choice. Great concept, never got any real interest, died out slowly, now you can’t even find information about it any more. OAuth2 rose from its rotting remains at some point.
RSS is a semi-federated protocol, as are Atom feeds, its successor. You don’t really send much data to these servers, but it does allow you to follow arbitrary web pages or people. If you’ve ever subscribed to a podcast using a third party app or website, you’ve probably accidentally used either Atom or RSS.
WordPress had this network of pingbacks that would share when one blog mentioned another, which worked across servers and domains just like a federated system.
In the 00s there were these special walkie-talkies that would set up an independent mesh network to communicate without cell service or internet connectivity. That was more peer to peer than federation, I guess, but it’s a pretty cool invention that was only used to send messages between Barbie coloured pieces of plastic.
Modern federated networks you may not know about include XMPP and Matrix for messaging, probably a system of interconnected patient databases if your government deals with healthcare, and I think the EU system that’ll let you log in to foreign government websites using your own government’s digital IT system could also be considered federated.
Bluesky is technically federated over ATProto and through bridges like bridgy fed you can set up bidirectional communications between the Fediverse and the ATProtoverse.