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?
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.
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.”
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. :)
