208

Your explanation of federation that it "works like email" will be misunderstood (transfem.social)

submitted 3 weeks ago by CyberTailor@lemmy.world to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

139 comments fedilink hide all child comments

The linked post shows how most non-tech people's understanding of email is very very different from most of the people here.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[-] SorteKanin@feddit.dk 10 points 3 weeks ago

I honestly think it stills explains it pretty well. Most casual users will not download a specific client and will be fine with the whole idea of an instance being tied to its user interface. It still explains pretty well that it doesn't largely matter what instance you sign up for and that any instance can talk to (mostly) any other instance, just like with email.

So yea, I still think it's a good analogy. It's not perfect but yea, that's to be expected from an analogy.

[-] Kolanaki@yiffit.net -3 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

I'm pretty tech minded and I have no idea what the hell any of y'all mean when you say it's like email because I don't know the technical details of how email works. I just know how it's used.

You think non-tech people are gonna understand that? They're just gonna assume it is email, in the way it is used; not how the shit works under the hood.

[-] SorteKanin@feddit.dk 11 points 3 weeks ago

When I make the analogy, I just mean the fact that a Gmail account can send emails to a Yahoo account or any other email provider. In the same way, a Feddit.dk account can talk to a yiffit.net account. There is not a single company controlling email and there is not a single company controlling the fediverse. That's really all there is to the analogy.

[-] hanrahan@slrpnk.net 4 points 3 weeks ago

You think non-tech people are gonna understand that?

Yes becase they're not looking to understand the protocol behind federarion anymore then you dowbt understand the protocol behind email, so they will grok better then you how it works bybusibg the email allegory, sending from gmail to outlook works for them.

I also use the phone network as another allegory if their eyes do glaze over, i can be with one phone company and phone somone on another companies plan. They have little idead of the prorogation of radiowaves etc that makes that all work.