For now, i don’t know how to explain it and make it comprehensible to tech illiterate, let alone incite them to give a try for longer than the very short term.
If you are yourself a tech illiterate, which method worked for you?
If the tech illiterate is someone you know, which method was successful to convince them?
like email, your Gmail.account can email.your Outlook account
Just say it is a message board and move on. A tech illiterate wont give a fuck about the inner workings of the site.
I think that we get stuck too much on how it works. We need to step back and ask ourselves what we are trying to explain.
The goal here is to have them try out a new social media. The media looks, feels and behaves like twitter. So the only explanation needed is “it’s like twitter”
You can then add what differentiate it from twitter “it’s open source” “it’s not controlled by big tech” “there are no ads” “it’s good a blocking nazi content (ymmv)”
IMHO advertising the decentralized “like email” nature of mastodon as a starting point is counter productive.
I’d guess that the content and the people would be a bigger factor for someone who isn’t very into technology than understanding the underlying concept and architecture.
I guess it depends how tech illiterate they are and where their confusion stems from, but as long as they know what email is, then I like to explain anything in the fediverse by using email as an analogy:
You know how, with email, you don’t have to care about whether the person you email is using Gmail or Apple or Yahoo or whatever? Email is the kind of message you send, and whoever gets it can use any email app to look at it and reply to you.
(Insert federated platform name here) works the same as email. You want to post or reply on (Insert federated platform name here)? Use whatever client you like, and it doesn’t matter if the people you’re communicating with use the same client.
It’s not strictly a perfect analogy, but it’s close enough to get over the usual confusion where people have been conditioned by corporate social networks to expect services to have one and only one blessed app.
It’s like Twitter, but anybody is free to spin up their own instance, and they’re all inter-compatible, so any one can view content from any other.
That freedom and openness gives users choice. If one instance owner turns out to be a real dick, the community is able to move off of and blacklist it.
Email is an oft used example. Leaving Gmail doesn’t lock you out of email because you can switch to a different provider or (with enough effort) even run your own email.
I’ve found that most people understand that signing up for an email service like Gmail allows them to communicate with people who aren’t on Gmail. Tie that in to explaining federation.
“Mastodon is kind of the same idea, but for social media.”
Obviously the technical details are different, but it helps explain federation at a very high level. Then you can talk about why that’s valuable for longevity of a system.
Example: the decline of Yahoo and AOL as email providers didn’t end email as a technology because email doesn’t depend on those companies existing to function.
I’m not “tech illiterate” by any means, but this whole federated thing took me a bit to get my head wrapped around.
I get it now, it’s basically just a bunch of content aggregators in a trench coat, and it doesn’t matter which one you sign up for.
It’s like signing up for Facebook, and getting access to Instagram, LinkedIn, Snapchat, and every other social media site in one place.
As someone who considers themselves tech illiterate I find this explanation is good enough
I don’t think the technology is the issue. After all from an user perspective, you just sign up somewhere and then get to see “all” the content in the Fediverse. Similar experience as setting up an email account at gmail or protonmail or whereever.
The problem is that there is no generic content. Most of it is often overly technical or political, so unless you are specifically into that you won’t have a good time.
Cell carriers! Say that mastodon is essentially how you can text someone from a different carrier , but for Twitter
Maybe leave out the tech and just recommend one server to sign up on and recommend a bunch of accounts to follow.
what if using your twitter account on the twitter website you could interact with posts from instagram and vice versa.
I would consider myself 100% tech illiterate and I have a hard time figuring out this website I’m on right now and what it even is. And there’s like hundreds just like this. Or something. No advice just yapping.
Then return to read the comments, maybe you learn something new. Also you can point out which ones make it easier to understand for you.
don’t explain the tech, talk about the community
A Mastodon instance is one Twitter, but there are many. Through federation they work together to appear as one Twitter.
