I introduced kbin to someone today who asked what the fediverse was. I answered for them of course, but it made me realize that the concept is still technobabble for most people. The average joe probably doesn’t care or notice that server A is really talking to server B. Just have them find out on their own and if a mass migration does need to happen from A to B, just make a standard announcement.
I think what scares people off is looking for an explanation and seeing 15 page documents or 30 minute videos explaining it.
“Fediverse lets different sites talk to each other. It’s like if Facebook could follow people on Twitter and subscribe to subreddits so now your Facebook page has Facebook posts, reddit Twitter posts, and reddit posts all in one, if you want. If you join a site on the fediverse, you can communicate with any other site on the fediverse easily.” 3 sentences gets the job done for what’s needed.
One they’re in kbin or whatever, they can learn the site. “oh a magazine is like a subreddit or like channels in a discord server” or whatever they’re used to.
I wish that’s how it was explained to me. I’m not massively into technology but it interests me casually so I was able to put up with the long explanations because it felt interesting to me. But it really could be boiled down so much more for newbies.
i just wish we can keep the terminologies consistent, even calling magazines as subs/subreddits.
people don’t want to learn another set of terminology when all they want to just to refer to that thing they want to point to.
i don’t even like the word “boost”. just give me up and down arrows and it’ll be good enough.
This is a great analogy. I also like the comparison to emails - doesn’t matter if you’re on Yahoo or Gmail or AOL (we’re still out here!), you can communicate with each other seamlessly, though your user experiences (email features, layouts, etc) may differ.