Hey there! Figured I’d share here since my main instance, Lemmy.ml, seems to be really broken right now. I published an article today focusing on some of the myths and misconceptions Mastodon users have spread over the last few years, with some critical analysis and debunking.
Let me know if you like it!
It’s a good metaphor for tech savvy users IMO, not for people who don’t know the difference between sending information over email vs sending the same information over an FB account to someone (for example).
I understand the email analogy now, but it didn’t help me in the beginning, like what part of email is the important part (I know, I might be the only one who didn’t get it 😊)?
Maybe I’m optimistic here, but I feel like most users of email and Facebook understand that you can send email from Gmail to Outlook and that those are different services, but you can’t send a Facebook(message? story? idk I don’t use Facebook) to a Twitter user.
I can’t think of a better way to explain that activitypub is an open and cross-compatible protocol. The only other big cross-compatible protocol is the web(HTML etc), but that’s hopeless, half of people don’t seem to understand what a browser is.
Why be so technically about it? I send SMS with signal, it’s just sending information.
The best description I have heard of Lemmy, Mastodon, … is that anyone can spin up an instance (so no central control). That’s it, anyone can make a Reddit or Twitter with this tech!
I don’t get it why you have to annoy non-tech savvy people with email server tech and activitypub protocols, I also think you might grossly overestimate peoples knowledge (and interest) in those techs. I bet most social media user don’t know or care about the underlying tech like at all.
I find it truly fascinating, but I think most people don’t.
For non tech savvy people it would be better to explain how a Fediverse platform functionally compares with the platform they are familiar with, rather than focusing on how the Fediverse platform works because most of them would be least interested in that.
Hell, I’m technically-minded and I do understand it, and I still don’t consider decentralization a particularly helpful feature of social media (yet).
Federation is technically interesting, but it introduces a lot of new complications that the software is still too new to have solved. The problems it does address, it doesn’t really solve very well yet. And I’ve always been willing to leave a social media network when it doesn’t suit me anymore, so centralization has never really bothered me.
What drew me here was the growing community. I would still be here if it was just one centralized service
Because it matters to the end user that all the instances are cross compatible, that’s the federated part. When I first heard of Lemmy and Mastadon as “self hosted social media”, I assumed that all the instances were isolated, and dismissed it as pointless. Once I learned what federation was, possibly through the email analogy, I was instantly onboard.
We’re not at a stage where you can make full use of these platforms without having a basic understanding of how they work. A disinterested idiot is going to go " WTF is an instance, why is [whatever instance they landed on] so empty" and give up. The email analogy is useful for the interested skeptic and they’re the people that are most likely to stick around.
In this thread the email analogy has been criticized for being not technically accurate enough and too technically accurate. That suggests it’s about right.