Actual photo of me trying to explain the fediverse to myself
I’ve had a small breakthrough here in a way that helps people understand, especially if they are Reddit users.
Have them pull up r/all, and just scroll a few posts and tell them to imagine that every subreddit is interestingasfuck@reddit.com, pics@reddit.com, gaming@reddit.com, etc
Then explain that Lemmy works the same way, except the content doesn’t all come from one website. It’s part of a network of sites that have agreed to an open protocol so everybody can share information freely.
You can explain the pros and cons if they’re still listening lol. But this seems easier for people to conceptualize, for whatever reason.
Lots of smaller social media sites that all work together as one large one?
sms is technically a decentralized network like the fediverse and xmpp
Email is probably the closest parallel for explanation purposes
I genuinely don’t understand this parallel, but I would like to. It feels like I’m missing something. Email has to go to a specified recipient every time. A post is avail to everyone in the community + federated instances.
The parallel is that email is built on a standard (well, two; RFC-5321 and RFC-5322), and it doesn’t matter what email server you use, whether it’s Gmail or Hotmail or a box in your basement running postfix, they’re all supposed to follow the standard and talk to each other; that is, they form a federated network. In the fediverse, we mostly use the ActivityPub standard, but the idea is the same.
XMPP is probably a technically better comparison, but try making that comparison to your parents. The point of the email comparison, even if it’s slightly less technically accurate, is that people have actually heard of email
Thanks! Good summary.
