If you where to try and explain the Fediverse to someone, how would you explain it with it’s different instances? As well as explain why it is better in some ways for the future of the Internet?
It’s like email: it doesn’t matter if you have an @gmail.com or @microsoft.com address, you can send and receive mail to/from anybody. Lemmy accounts and communities consist of a name which includes the instance, just like e-mail.
That’s it, I don’t think a regular user needs to know more.
You know how you can send an email from Gmail to someone with a yahoo.com address and it just works? It’s like that but for social media.
Yeah I thought about that method but it seems to just make it more complex
Seriously, though? Everybody goes to the email analogy. The email analogy really doesn’t work.
Not only does it raise more questions than it answers, but it is also not a way people conceptualize social media and it generates the false assumption that the posts themselves exist as the component units of the entire thing as opposed to being tied to the format of the instance.
The thing is you don’t even need to bring up interoperability for somebody curious about a specific federated app. In practice, most of the experience doesn’t require wrapping your head around that part and somebody can explain the details the first time you get a weirdly formatted posts in your streams.
It worked for me. Also since you’re so critical about the email analogy, what’s your solution?
Literally saying nothing.
The wonders of interoperability are a small anecdotal thing for techheads. You don’t need to think about that at all, barring some edge cases or being lightly confused by somebody posting more than 500 characters on Mastodon.
You just… tell people Mastodon is like Twitter or Kbin is like Reddit and let them have at it. A million federation evangelists will answer their questions in three months when they ask how come they got a notification from being quoted on a different platform or something. If they ask “which of these servers do I join”, which is the only hurdle up front, just point at the biggest one that is taking free signups.
How should those federation evangelists explain it? You’ve basically just passed the job to someone else lol
Yes, but crucially I’ve passed the job to someone else who is a) already doing that full time in excruciating, obnoxious detail, and b) who is behind the massive barrier to entry that is making an account and starting to use the service.
By that point the people asking the question already know the basics and are engaged. At that point the problem is stopping people from scaring them away by overexlpaining federation, not getting them to understand how it works. It’s not the same.
It’s like a big mall, and it doesn’t really matter which store you enter through.
So what can you buy there?
One of box stores on the end of the mall is ‘tankies unlimited’
It’s multiple social media sites that send each other messages to sync the content between them. You create your account on one of them, but you can see posts and can contact and follow people from all of them. They are run by different people, and if one goes offline or rogue the others preserve the content but stop syncing with it. So the sites keep each other honest, and no one person or company is in control of the whole thing.
It isn’t very difficult to understand, or new. Usenet used a similar system of exchange between news servers, and before people had the Internet in their homes (pre- 1990s) BBS systems used RelayNet and FidoNet.
It’s built upon communities that can congregate in one area and engage with other communities.
It’s not run by Wall Street or billionaire backed entities so the platform lacks an algorithm designed to keep your attention to show you ads.
It’s new, lacks the shine and polish of established platforms, and there’s a bit of friction with on-boarding and usage.
