this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2024
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The problem is people think it's email. I don't blame them, they hear the word email and they think email.
They don't think or hear the technical explanation and workings of: "Anyone can run their own email server, and federate by accepting emails from other email servers." It's not how the vast, vast majority of people work.
I mean the response of the curious even would probally be "you can run your own email server?".
Why do they need to? We hide the technical and inner workings of most things, because half the population is too stupid to understand it. It doesn't mean they can't use it. Look at lemmy for instance. I'd be willing to bet 99% of the people here couldn't set up a lemmy instance for themselves.
??? That's exactly what I'm saying. We don't need to explain the inner workings with comparisons to email. Just tell them to browse or make an account.
But people need something to compare it to. They don't know why the fediverse is something they should want.
The email comparison is to explain that they can participate anywhere, it's not to fundamentally portray the inner workings of it; but just to approximate it on a surface level.
Kind of like saying "Facebook is kinda like Myspace"...it wasn't Myspace, and we're not asking people understand the technical differences, but there has to be some sort of starting-off point.
I explain to people that it's like Twitter, but if twitter acted like email where you could sign up with any provider.
Tell them it's Social media. That's the comparison they need. For why they might want it: it's not controlled by a corporation.
Ok the confusion may be that what you think is surface level is the inner working. Surface level to normal people is the user interface. The surface level of Lemmy for instance is it's like social media. Just like the surface level of emails is "dear sir blah blah blah regards" and cc this person. You say email and they think of that surface level. Talking about how it works with intercommunication between instances like email intercommunicates is literally the inner working. And leads to the exact content of the tweet, you should reread it. Ok I'm just repeating myself so that I'm out.
Signing up is the first interaction you have in order to use the site; thus my opinion that it's surface-level. I mean, lurkers who never sign up could be considered - but I'd argue they don't really need a federated site then.