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.
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
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
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
- 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.
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 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 like an e-mall.
The pentagram is a good start 👍🏻
The fediverse is like an apartment block and an instance is one of the apartments. When you create an account in the instance, you “chose” to move into that apartment.
A community in that instance is like a room in the apartment. There can be any number of rooms in the apartment, just like there can be any number of communities in the apartment.
Even though your account is in this instance, it doesn’t mean you’re stuck there. You can “visit” your neighbours in the other apartments (instantances) and interact with the people there.
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.It’s social media made by the ultranerds who warned you about social media. You can sign up on any site and use every site. Mostly. Pick a site that’s not run by assholes and you won’t have to worry.
Pick a site that’s not run by assholes and you won’t have to worry.
That’s an incredibly confusing thing to say to someone who doesn’t know what the fediverse is and wants to get involved. It raises so many questions, answers none of them and leaves.
If you can’t trust yourself to skim a website and figure out if you want to be there, not being there is a fine decision.
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.
Don’t. Just set up an account, install an app and tell them to go play. They’ll figure out the important bits in time.
