Guys, when you talk about the Fediverse to friends, family, or colleagues, how do you explain it?
Do you call it a “decentralized social network,” an “alternative to big tech,” or “a collection of open-source networks”? And how do you convince someone to create an account on Mastodon, Lemmy, Pixelfed, etc., without them getting scared by technical terms like instance, federated, or peer-to-peer?
I’m asking because my so-called friends don’t believe me and even call me crazy when I talk about this “nonsense.”
The future is open source, decentralized, and federated!
I don’t. It’s bad enough that people spend too much time on social media. Why the fuck would i introduce another one?
I’m practically only here because rif died. Its not because it’s enjoyable. I open the app to maybe see one good post among the thousands and thousands of “same”-posts.
A free and open source social media platform supported only by the users and not by spying on its users.
Just wait until they get banned from reddit, get them to sign up and show them the Boost client (that used to work on reddit) and away they’ll go. That’s how i did it :-)
I don’t. I say oh yeah I read that on Lemmy. They don’t ask, I don’t offer.
If for some reason they say what is Lemmy? I say just a community version of Reddit not run by companies.
They never ask further, so I don’t need to start explaining parallels to email.
Here’s a better link from mastodon. It gives you a preview and has no ads.
“I’m trying to cut down on social media.”
Great, mastodon isn’t optimised for engagement, it’s just stuff you follow in chronological order.
When people start talking about why they deleted instagram etc because of all the ads and time wasting, I tell them I’m using / posting on Pixelfed etc because it’s community owned, no ads, no brainwashing. That gets them interested but not enough to go and figure out what an instance is.
The whole thing with federating is irrelevant to most users.
I tell them it’s a social media built in a way that makes it impossible for any company to take over it in order to make profit. And then I show them to some instance I’ve hand-picked for them, without really telling them there are other instances as well. It’s not something they should worry about at that point. I can explain it later on, anyway.
The whole thing with federating is irrelevant to most users.
I tell them it’s a social media built in a way that makes it impossible for any company to take over it in order to make profit. And then I show them to some instance I’ve hand-picked for them, without really telling them there are other instances as well. It’s not something they should worry about at that point. I can explain it later on, anyway. interesting!
I normally just say, “I read [x] on Lemmy.”
If they ask and are genuinely curious what that is, I tell them it’s like a reddit offshoot, but the users control the network and servers with a high level of transparency in administration/moderation and run off software that can have tens of thousands of crowdsourced eyes helping to find and fix any bug or security issue.
I don’t introduce people to the fediverse
The fediverse introduces people to you
HELLO FRIEND
Correct answer, my fight for privacy is weird enough for the average. Introducing the fediverse would make it worse.
I don’t bother explaining it unless asked. I just share content with them. They can figure it out if they’re interested.
If I am asked, then it’s “a decentralized platform similar to…” whatever. Most folks are “don’t know, don’t care” when it comes to anything technical.
“The memes and news site I use.”
That’s it. No infodumping, no explaining the technicalities, just tell them “just pick one, it’s basically like a username” and worry about it only if they want to learn about the underside of it.
We don’t “explain” email to people - they just pick a site, sign up, and move on.
Working in tech I learned to only explain the workings of something if they ask since most users are perfectly fine on a surface level and can intuit more than we credit them for once they know the basic gist.
I don’t. Even I don’t like it here. I’m just a man of principle so I’m not going back to Reddit so this’ll have to do.
Why do you not like it here? What can/should be done differently?
Quite a homogenous user base with incredibly predictable reactions and views on world events, and the feed is basically just US politics and other news articles designed to make people angry or reinforce their pre-existing beliefs. This simply isn’t a fun place to be. The so-called “regrettable minutes” make up a really high percentage of the total time spent here. And that’s even after I’ve blocked virtually all of the worst communities and users, as well as built a long list of content filters based on keywords. I just have no desire to recommend anyone come here, since I’d consider that bad advice. This is a perfect example of what’s wrong with social media. Reddit’s nowhere near perfect either, but I was much less unhappy there.
“the place I found after reddit because reddit is fucking garbage”
Unsuccessfully so far, that’s for sure
