Sometimes I struggle to convey what continues to fascinate me about dezentraly organized social media - its like explaining to someone who never played Go why its awesome who never played it.
And what I would usually recommend is (in the case of Go): watch hikaru no go (popular Go anime). I could teach them the rules, but to capture the spirit of it, I would also need to spend hours playing it with them. So instead, I give them an awesome series, which conveys the drama, fights, frustrations through story.
Would that also work for the fediverse? Sometimes I tend to get lost in technical details and how it tries to solve problems about moderation without conveing any of the daily drama and excitement I have - so what would be a good series/film/anime/book/comic that could convey this? Or do we need to create it?
If I were you, I’d stop trying to explain one thing that I’m struggling to explain using the other thing I’m struggling to explain as an analogy.
But they are similar problems and I assumed the overall problem is very familiar to people around here
Ok, let me try again. I think people forget the mental shift that it takes to join a federated network. And I think you cannot convey that in a simple analogy. People are so used to a central power behind their social media that they don’t even understand the concept of having a social network with no one defining the rules. Its simply not part of their world view. And to open them up for this kind of mindset is hard.
I don’t think that this is entirely true. Every instance has admins, communities have admins and moderators too. They define and enforce rules, make decisions and perform maintenance. It’s not that different from centralized platforms with the exception that there’s no common higher authority.
I’d use something that people are already familiar with: emails are the most common example. But maybe people could imagine a world, where users on Facebook could see posts and interact with people from Twitter and vice versa. Platforms are different, owners are different, but people in this hypothetical scenario could communicate with each other. That’s much more relevant to modern world than emails and probably not that hard to imagine.
Fediverse is like that, but you can also pay $5 for a server and start your own Facebook.
Imagine a bunch of separate web forums each with their own management and policies. We have all used those. Now imagine that they are loosely connected to each other behind the scenes, so you can cross-post between them, if the admins are willing. That’s not too hard to understand, imho.
There is occasional minor drama when there are cultural differences between two forums (say a leftwing vs a rightwing political forum) and the admins get upset and start interfering with the backend connectivity (defederating other instances) because they don’t like what members of the other forum are saying. That drama is not an attractive feature of the fediverse, but rather the opposite. Anyway, I hope that helps.
If somone tried to convice me with anime to join the fediverse, I’d never join…
Then you watched the wrong anime ;)
Replace anime with DC cartoons.
“There’s this thing called the fediverse. To understand it, watch this episode of Batman. Go ahead, I’ll wait.”
See what the parent poster means?
I think the only answer here is that we need Japan to create “Hikaru no Lemmy”, where an ancient spirit of a dead Lemmy poster possesses a young boy called Hikaru, who proceeds to amaze the world with some top tier Lemmy posts 😛
Or more seriously, I’m a huge fan of this infographic and share it with people whenever I get asked about Lemmy: https://i.imgur.com/b2QuYAR.png
Good one indeed!
Ha ha, good one :D The graphic is also good. I wish there would be one in like a medieval fantasy setting. On the left side you have a mad king who tries to control the whole empire, on the right you have federated states, each with their own community and rules. I think these graphics are great but I wish we would make more use of storytelling: for example, someone growing up in the centralised fantasy kingdom, who then joins federated tribes living in the wild. I think that could also be done with just a few slides.
One would make sure that it doesn’t get too political though …
I honestly don’t get what there is to say. Anyone trying to tell me about the dramas of any social network, be it the Fediverse, Twitter, Pinterest or Facebook will have an uphill battle.
The content itself can be interesting, but the platform itself rarely is.
Good point. But with decentral social media you have to take part in this stuff at least to some degree. Or you are on a very solid instance. Better then to prepare people about this stuff too.
I don’t think it’s worth spending the cycles trying to talk about or convince others to join the Fediverse - no one likes an evangelist.
Instead, state the problem and what the Fediverse aims to solve. If one is interested in the problem and is hooked by the solution, that person will seek it out.
Since you’re struggling to provide your own analogy, break things down to basics. Do you know what the problem of social media is? Do you know what the problem of centralization is? Do you know the problem of centralization under corporate or government control? Do you know how decentralization provides a solution to that problem?
If you can break those down and understand it yourself, you can use that as part of the solution. Try facing a mirror and answering the above questions aloud to yourself so you can hear yourself talk. If you can’t explain it, then you’re not ready to explain it to others, and certainly not ready to answer questions when people ask you about it. Analogies aid to the explanation, not substitute it.
State the problem to the person succinctly. Then the solution. It’s important to state those without bias or feelings. You can give anime examples later.
Example posed in a friendly, conversational, and nontechnical manner:
You’ve heard of some of the controversy around Twitter right? The problem with Twitter is that a controversial figure has purchased control over the product, made sweeping changes that are the opposite of Twitter’s mission and values, and has introduced disruptive functionalities that have significantly hurt the user’s experience. In other words, he’s made it much harder for someone to enjoy Twitter, and has made it easier for someone to get scammed or spread misinformation. Twitter users are kind of stuck unless they move to a different platform. But that’s tough because so many people use it.
The Fediverse is a new social media concept that’s come out, and it’s different from things like Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter. Fediverse is not controlled by any corporation, but by individuals all across the planet that run their own server. An example of a Twitter competitor in the Fediverse is called Mastodon. Mastodon let’s you Tweet, connect, like, share, etc. George Takei from Star Trek is on Mastodon! Since no one controls the Fediverse, the risk of some controversial figure moving in and buying it is extremely small because of how it’s designed. No corporate control, no rich people owning it, no ads, and it is solely focused on the users rather than profits. It’s basically run by volunteers. It’s new and growing, and probably something you should consider checking out if you’re interested. Lots of people started moving over to Mastodon after the recent Twitter controversies.
Good point
I usually explain it simply:
“Do you use email?” “Yeh” “It works similar doesn’t matter which provider you choose Proton, G-mail, Yahoo and your mail can go to all of the others.”
I tell people it’s like signing up for a newsletter with your email, except the newsletter is also your social media feed.
Right and that explains it well. But it doesn’t exactly get people excited or make them understand what it FEELS like to be part of a federated social network.
It’s weird that you think people should be excited. This is just a forum for discussion, there’s really nothing exciting about it.
If there’s too much excitement and drama, something has gone wrong.
I tended to just send people links to communities they might like them follow up with an explanation of what Lemmy is, if asked. Bit boring I know.
I don’t see the drama. I’ve been on Usenet, Reddit, single sited forums etc. for a long time, and now Lemmy. Lemmy is actually underwhelming for now, though hopefully it will keep expanding.
Federation itself is no big deal. In fact it’s annoying because you can’t easily search across the entire fediverse with a single query, the way you can search Reddit. Plus the burbles we get over defederation tell me that federation (as currently implemented) is a misfeature. There should be cleaner separation of back ends (instances) and clients (web UI’s and local apps), and federation should happen in the client. That way you can view any instances and communities you want to in a single interface, instead of leaving it up to server admins.
It’s a network of social media, all using the same protocols, and each tends to have some focus: Canada, Australia, art, communism, and large numbers of members, for example.
I didn’t find federated social media to he hard to understand after the first hour or so. Is that weird?
I enjoyed Cory Doctorow’s book, “Walkaway” which is about a group of people who decide to opt-out of the corporate-controlled mainstream society. There are aspects to the Fediverse which make me think of the kinds of technology that these people use in the book.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walkaway_(Doctorow_novel)
It’s a great book, give it a read.
Yes! This book is constantly going through my mind when I think about the Fediverse. Nice to encounter someone else who enjoyed it.
I think some others here are missing the point of the question. Right now people are arguing about the fosstodon mods policy that all posts there must be in English. People are coming at it from every angle you can imagine, and maybe some you can’t. It’s amazing! Here on Lemmy we had our own little drama with behaw (de)federation a while ago. (How did that play out? I didn’t pay close attention.)
I think OP is asking how to convey that drama of fedi culture. Not (necessarily) the technical aspects.
Yeah, I think I should have stated that more cleary … :)
Well, there is drama, like in any human community, it’s just that this community has half a million computer nerds.
It’s a bunch of people that have been leading the technological revolution of the past decades, all experimenting with something called the Fediverse.
While everything is new and there are a lot of changes, some things are more common than others.
- Privacy matters.
- Freedom of speech matters.
- The internet should be built by the people, and for the people, not big corps.
PS Not everyone here is a computer nerd, though that’s something to take pride in IMO, but most of us kinda area.
I think this is a neat idea! How to make it work though…
From my perspective, the fediverse is mostly about pioneering. Venturing to new places where the others (twitter, reddit) have been for years and were established. We‘re still fighting trolls and stans from time to time but far less than on the reddit side.
There is corporate disobedience as we walk away from the known, the enshittified and the boring to brave places where new people might spit in our face or name you their bff.
I mean, the fediverse is really as if someone had hacked twitter, sold the code to 100 people and now they all spin up connected clones. Same with reddit. Benefit: one clone goes down and the service still exists.
If you need more inspiration i‘d suggest asking chat gpt. :)
The best way to get people to be interested in something is to tell them they can’t. Be a hipster. Tell them Fediverse is cool but they don’t know anything about it.
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I don’t think it has more or less drama compared to other social networks, I think it’s more so that it’s just easier to pick up on drama that normally gets lost throughout all the noise on bigger platforms. r/subredditdrama and r/drama are GIANT and really difficult to keep up with. There reaches a point where all the drama on a social media site it just blends into all the noise most of the time unless it affects the entire site. It takes alot to truly fuck shit up, like poor business decisions (ahem…) or major inter community strife.
Alongside that in comparison to centralized social media, if an instance is a hot bed for drama and toxicity? It might be time to move to a different one.
