Yep. Terrible analogy, a bad fit for both the tech and the use cases, tells nothing to anybody, and federation is not the biggest feature most people care about going into Mastodon anyway.
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scytale@lemm.ee 10 months ago
I agree with the email metaphor being a bad example. If you’re talking to a twitter user, it’s easier to describe it as a platform where anyone can set up their own twitter website and you can sign up with any of them and see content from the other sites. Then just switch it up to whatever they’re familiar with (i.e. reddit, discord, etc.). I don’t know why people like using email as an example.
MudMan@kbin.social 10 months ago
sour@kbin.social 10 months ago
is comparing to real country better
biddy@feddit.nl 10 months ago
Email is the only federated social platform that every normal person is familiar with. It doesn’t matter that the technical specifications are completely different. The metaphor goes as far as “in the fediverse anyone signed up with any instance can communicate with anyone on any other instance, like email”. For that purpose, it’s a good metaphor.
Kaldo@kbin.social 10 months ago
Except it's basically impossible to host your own mail server and have it work reliably, especially for a casual user. Mail space is dominated by Gmail, Hotmail, Protonmail and other giants.
Even if it might be a good comparison underneath for the technical side, it is not a favorable comparison for an user looking to get into the fediverse.
biddy@feddit.nl 10 months ago
The same thing is true here. A novice shouldn’t be hosting their own instance, heck a experienced user shouldn’t host their own instance unless they want a hobby.
Kaldo@kbin.social 10 months ago
I hope these kinks get ironed out as the software matures. I see no reason why people wouldn't be able to just rent a cloud server, run a few docker commands and have their own instance running one day. Maybe not for kbin or lemmy, but at least mastodon.
As long as we all continue to federate with each other instead of relying on some corporation to say whose messages go through and whose don't, there's a chance.
Serinus@lemmy.world 10 months ago
That will likely happen to the Fediverse as well, for the same reasons.
Kaldo@kbin.social 10 months ago
Not necessarily, email had to work well because businesses depended on it and (lots of) money was involved. Fediverse is a much more hobbyist endeavor and attracts groups of people who are not profit driven.
That could change sure, but that's why it's important to stick to these (FOSS) principles from the start. It's why it was important to reject threads in the fediverse and not let it overtake everything, which it luckily doesn't seem like it's gonna any time soon.
Valmond@lemmy.mindoki.com 10 months ago
It’s a good metaphor for tech savvy users IMO, not for people who don’t know the difference between sending information over email vs sending the same information over an FB account to someone (for example).
I understand the email analogy now, but it didn’t help me in the beginning, like what part of email is the important part (I know, I might be the only one who didn’t get it 😊)?
biddy@feddit.nl 10 months ago
Maybe I’m optimistic here, but I feel like most users of email and Facebook understand that you can send email from Gmail to Outlook and that those are different services, but you can’t send a Facebook(message? story? idk I don’t use Facebook) to a Twitter user.
I can’t think of a better way to explain that activitypub is an open and cross-compatible protocol. The only other big cross-compatible protocol is the web(HTML etc), but that’s hopeless, half of people don’t seem to understand what a browser is.
Valmond@lemmy.mindoki.com 10 months ago
Why be so technically about it? I send SMS with signal, it’s just sending information.
The best description I have heard of Lemmy, Mastodon, … is that anyone can spin up an instance (so no central control). That’s it, anyone can make a Reddit or Twitter with this tech!
I don’t get it why you have to annoy non-tech savvy people with email server tech and activitypub protocols, I also think you might grossly overestimate peoples knowledge (and interest) in those techs. I bet most social media user don’t know or care about the underlying tech like at all.
I find it truly fascinating, but I think most people don’t.