1070
Federated social media from before it was cool
(lemmy.world)
It's funny when armchair experts insist that the fediverse won't catch on because "federation is too hard to understand" when arguably the most widespread communication system on the internet follows the same model
IRC was "kinda" federated. You needed to convince a server already in the network to accept your server. But in the early days requirements were quite low.
BBS was not really federated (except Fidonet I guess).
Usenet, I guess it kinda was. But only ISPs were really running NNTP servers. Only they and unis really had the resources to too.