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.
That weirdly makes sense. I hate it. But kinda makes sense with some people.
So, basically like email.
Yeah my emails are not posts everyone can see.
It’s okay for tech savvy people but I’d go with something seriously less techy.
Like it’s social media (Reddit, twitter, but not FB I guess) it’s just that it’s not controlled by one company. It’s an enthusiast thing.
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.”
And anyone can set up their own facebook/twitter site and you can choose which one to sign up with. Then you can interact with other people on other facebook/twitter sites.
I like this one
Also works for describing blocking of users and domains!
There’s a lot of technical answers being proposed but you really need to keep in mind your target audience. Do they actually care how it works at all, or are they less technically minded.
Take the email comparison, it makes an excellent example for people who know how email works but most people don’t know so it’s not helpful as a comparison to them.
For the layman it’s probably best to stick to a simple description, such as: The Fediverse is community organized social media, it works the same as Reddit/Twitter but it’s not owned by any company. There are a few extra steps when you first sign up, but it’s well worth it for the extra control you get.
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.
It’s like an e-mall.
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”.
It’s like the United States. Your Colorado driver’s license is accepted as ID in Virginia.
Each state has their own rules, but there are a few common rules about interstate interactions that are established by the Federal government.
“It’s like e-mail, but for social media. You create an account with GMail or Yahoo or whoever, and that lets you interact with anyone else with an e-mail address, doesn’t matterof they’re using the same e-mail service as you.”
Honestly to me that made it even more confusing
You know how when you sign up with gmail it only let’s you email other gmail users and no one with a different email domain? It’s like that.
Firstly, your ‘instance’ is just like your email server. It doesn’t matter if it’s @yahoo.com or @google.com, I can still email you and you can respond. Some people even have their own servers.
Next, imagine if Facebook, Instagram and Twitter users could all follow each other’s posts. The posts are already pretty much the same but we just add @Facebook or @Twitter to the end. You could log in to one, but see posts from the others. The only difference is the layout and design of the interface, like the difference between ‘Gmail’ and ‘Outlook’.
You can also move between servers easily if you want. Sick of @Facebook? Move to @Instagram without losing followers.
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 have built my own instance. With blackjack! And hookers!
I federate with just everybody. And guess what, it works. That’s awesome.
This completely depends who you’re communicating with and what their level of tech literacy is, but also their level of interest in hearing the techy details. Most of the time I’m explaining it to middle-aged women who still have Facebook accounts, so that should give you an idea where I’m personally coming from.
If they’re asking specifically about the term “Fediverse”, usually because they heard me talking about it, I tell people that it’s just the name for a group of different social media type sites that all communicate with each other instead of being completely separate like the ones they’re probably familiar with. It’s like having an account on Facebook, and using it to keep up and chat with your friends on TikTok too without ever having to make an account there.
Since one of the main hurdles during big switchovers is the “oh not another account to sign up for” feeling, this on its own is a pretty big eye-opener for a lot of people in terms of why it’s better.
Then I’ll talk about what the community is like here around our shared interests (mostly fibre crafts), because that’s what people actually care about.
If they show no further interest, they still now understand more than at least 95% of people.
Some will be interested in giving it a go themselves, in which case I tell them to start with Mastodon, which is a bit like Twitter except not awful. I get them to join the default server unless they are quite techy, but let them know they don’t need to understand what that means because they’ll naturally pick it up and can easily move to another server later if they want, so it’s not a big deal decision. I’ll guide them through the basic gist, get them to make an introduction post, and use my modest reach on there to get them a few initial followers so they don’t feel like they’re shouting into the void.
The problem with most explanations is that enthusiastic nerds try to fit absolutely everything in at once. Federation, instances etc. And it’s just too much especially for a non-techy crowd. Give them the info they actually need to get started and drip-feed the rest over time.
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.
- Social media owned by companies, by their nature, undergo enshittification. It may not be now, but it will happen sometime in the future.
- If we make social media that is owned and controlled by the people, we can avoid enshittification
- The Fediverse is an attempt to create social media owned by the people.
All the analogies about email and whatnot, or the comments trying to explain how federation works, they’re missing a big part of the question. They’re not technically wrong, but those answers are exactly what put me off the Fediverse initially. And I suspect those answer will put off other people, too. And it should be relatively clear why, if you think about it from newbies’ perspectives: the question that newbies are asking is what the Fediverse is. Trying to answer how the Fediverse works is avoiding the question entirely. You can’t explain the “how” to someone if they don’t even know what it is. It’s like explaining how to design a software to a caveman, without explaining what a software is.
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As true as this is, the overwhelming majority of people also have no concept of how email works.
The pentagram is a good start 👍🏻
