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?
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.