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?
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.
Also works for describing blocking of users and domains!
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.
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 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”.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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Each home has communities. No matter where your home is, you can access and participate in all communities - from your home and others.
You choose a home to your liking, for example from which country, or moderation policy, or topic themes. You make your account on that home, and then access and join the communities you want to.
It’s a gargantuan group of forums that you can access through your home forum. Your home forum admins act like admins on your home forum but have no power elsewhere.
Or “It’s like Reddit, but with longer URLs and a slightly different user culture.”
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”
This gonna be long, might just want to ignore :)
It’s not that easy or we’d be doing it already.
Problem one: Techie. The term ‘federation’ may evoke images of a space opera for some, potentially alienating a large audience who may perceive it as overly technical or complex. This is despite the numerous companies utilizing federation to effect positive change in the world. The reality is, the average person may not immediately associate the term with these beneficial applications.
Problem two: Bifurcation. Any explanation and advantages you give for decentralization will feel inadequate compared to their worry and confusion over bifurcated communities and the next several problems in this list.
Problem three: Four letter word. Users on centralized platforms often view ‘Federation’ with skepticism, insisting that it’s too complicated. “Eww you don’t want to go over there, that place is just a hot mess, it’s too complicated. Just stay here, it’ll get better here.”
Problem four: Identity. Everyone on centralized social is completely wrapped around their identity. I am MrMcSniggles, it is my legacy and there can be only one. In Federation, there can be a thousand MrMcSniggles. Verification and ID ownership is pretty weak in the Lemmyverse.
Problem five: Login. Oh what server do I choose? We tell them that it doesn’t matter, but if they pick an extremist node, or a node small enough not to get global community traffic, they’re going to have a bad experience. They’re all going to gravitate toward the largest nodes, which is better these days but goes against the whole point of federation.
Problem six: Discovery. So who will see posts? That’s simple, yet mind bending for the uninitiated. You post it on your local node. If no one on your local node shares or boosts it, the global community will never see it. What posts do I see? Well you see, at best, what the people on your instance are seeing. Oh so that’s everything on the federation? No. Oh so what do they see. That discussion is also off putting enough to turn many away.
Problem seven: Permanence and Migration. If you get through login and they’re still onboard, what happens if a server goes tits up? Do my old posts still stick around? Well, kinda, but not really. Do I get to keep my old subscriptions at least? (hopefully soon) For the moment, no, unless you sign up for this third party service.
Problem eight: Algorithm. You go to the community tab, you select all, let’s see some raw unfiltered… OK, look at that, bots reposting everything on Reddit. Bots reposting every game for every team for every sport. What do I do? Well get to blocking. Oh I can block that easily? Well, it’s like 4 clicks per block, if it’s stuff you know you don’t want you might be able to block a user and get multiples done, sometimes it’s just a community you want gone, and another, and another and well hell, this is another full time job. They’re going to miss the Algorithm. Trying to convince them that less doom scrolling is good is often a fools errand.
Problem nine: Defederation. Every time a node gets defederated, there’s a huge stink. We do it really often because we lack admin tools to handle global individual/community censorship. In one paragraph we tout free speech, but in the same paragraph we end up talking about the banhammer required to keep the communities civil.
Solution one: You can explain that federation is like email providers, which is closely resembles, but the finer points on the analogy are lost on the uninitiated, it turns to confusion, begs more explanation, ends up making it sound more complicated than it is.
Solution two:
You can say that Federation is a backend thing and it doesn’t affect your social media except that you have to include what service you’re using in your @'s This works pretty well, but it breaks your request to tell them why federation is so good.Solution three: You can dumb it down and make a series of points ignoring the negatives. No one can take down the network. You are not a product to be sold, you are free to move around the network as you see fit to find your home. As other services video, images, audio, blogging pop up, you can interact with them from your existing accounts. But all these end up being far more complicated as they start asking questions.
None of these are great, upside and downsides. I really wish we could come up with some kind of nickname solution like IRC, that and some good admin tools would go a long way toward reducing the excuses people use to stay away.
“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.”
