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?
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.
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.
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.
already doing that full time in excruciating, obnoxious detail
How would this person describe The Fediverse?
Constantly, through obtuse similes that only make sense if you already understand what is being explained to you and mostly to each other, rather than to anybody who wouldn’t know.
But still, by that point you have an account, so you’re already set.
So, basically like email.
Yeah I thought about that method but it seems to just make it more complex
I hate to break the news, but yea the fediverse is more complex
I know it’s more complex, just if you are trying to explain what the Fediverse is to someone who’s older or someone who just thinks it’s another social media instead of a whole new way of looking at the internet it’s hard to explain to that person who isn’t really looking actively for an ‘alternative’ for ‘x’ platform.
Gotta start with simple context they understand and you can add the complexity later.
Especially when trying to explain that Mastodon and Lemmy can’t talk together but you can still follow / subscribe to people
“Imagine you could see someone’s twitter page from your Facebook account. It’s like that.”
Also works for describing blocking of users and domains!
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.
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’
Mainly OnlyFans… A Fediverse store sounds kind of call though.
“It’s just like Twitter/Reddit/Instagram. Just sign up, you’ll can figure out the few differences later”.
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Personally I’d do it just like this, though this was written specifically for reddit refugees and uses the structure of reddit as the baseline for an analogy.
https://lemmy.world/post/583669
It’s better because it’s more resistant to the pressures of corporate consolidation of power over the industries they operate in. It harnesses more of the advantages of a smaller-scale free market, where establishing smaller scale competitors to larger, more established players is much easier, thus creating a more dynamic space. No one algorithm will ever be able to rule us, we will always be able to simply switch Instances, or even make our own. Even if the Lemmy devs ruin Lemmy somehow, there are other reddit-analogue Fediverse services, and switching is not hard. You would theoretically retain access to all the same content, merely having to start over with a fresh account. Not exactly a big deal, usually.
I mean yeah, you could make your own private reddit too, but y’know, without being able to federate to an existing userbase and body of content, good luck achieving any kind of success.
I recently setup my own instance and wrote this for people new to lemmy:
Federated?
~ Anyone can host a server ~ Servers host instances ~ Instances host Communities ~ Communities host wonderful people ~ Instances can communicate freely between eachother This is the federationWhat makes Lemmy and any federated platform so interesting is the ActivityPub protocol. This allows Lemmy, which is a content aggregator social media, to communicate (or Federate) with other types of social media, such as Mastodon (a twitter microblog style) and PeerTube (video hosting). Meaning any instance of the Fediverse can independently read each others content, without the necessity of having to use different apps and/or accounts.
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I know it’s more complex, just if you are trying to explain what the Fediverse is to someone who’s older
“Remember Usenet?”
“Just like that, but anyone can run a server and start their own newsgroups”
I have built my own instance. With blackjack! And hookers!
I federate with just everybody. And guess what, it works. That’s awesome.
You know how with SMS and emails, there are many different providers, but anybody can talk to anybody as long as you both have a number/address - that’s essentially how it works on the Fediverse.
Rather than one big server controlling everything (i.e. Twitter, Reddit), you have many smaller servers (“instances”) ran by different people talking to one another to form the wider network.
You sign up to an “instance” (like an email provider or phone carrier), and then they provide you an address you can use to communicate with other servers/instances your host is connected/“federated” to.
For the lay person:
It’s like if you could see Twitter threads and Reddit posts on your Facebook in a single feed, and choose between them which set of rules, interfaces, and styles you prefer. Since everything shares content, it is easier for new sites to open which helps keep the user experience competitive.
