Its actually simple. Tell them, its like Email. You have an email account at gmail, but can perfectly fine have email conversation with someone on outllook. Lemmy instance = the same as a web email interface of any email provider. Most people will get their head around that.
As soon as you have to explain the fediverse to someone using analogies my experience is that most people have already given up. They just can’t be bothered to learn something new.
exactly.
and I am even gonna question whether that is a good thing for this use case. I get that it’s cool for the idealists and techy folks. decentralized and all that.
but for exchanging links and discussing them, what an aggregator is supposed to be, you just want everything in one place. that is what people asking for a super instance mean. there is just too much friction to get there, imho.
in the side bar on my instance-of-choice, there is a link to a community browser. but if you click on a community on a different instance it sends you to that instance. i.e. you are logged out. so you cannot just click ‘subscribe’. You have to go back to your own instance > communities > all > start typing > now you can finally subscribe.
ain’t nobody got time for that!
I love this. Perfect analogy because it’s literally the same.
Got to say I’m really excited that nobody can own the master instance of say this channel. If some channel goes rogue, there can be easily a competing instance that challenges the top spot. And the same applies to servers themselves. Everyone has to cooperate or you will be excluded.
Its actually simple. Tell them, its like Email. You have an email account at gmail, but can perfectly fine have email conversation with someone on outllook. Lemmy instance = the same as a web email interface of any email provider. Most people will get their head around that.
As soon as you have to explain the fediverse to someone using analogies my experience is that most people have already given up. They just can’t be bothered to learn something new.
exactly.
and I am even gonna question whether that is a good thing for this use case. I get that it’s cool for the idealists and techy folks. decentralized and all that.
but for exchanging links and discussing them, what an aggregator is supposed to be, you just want everything in one place. that is what people asking for a super instance mean. there is just too much friction to get there, imho.
in the side bar on my instance-of-choice, there is a link to a community browser. but if you click on a community on a different instance it sends you to that instance. i.e. you are logged out. so you cannot just click ‘subscribe’. You have to go back to your own instance > communities > all > start typing > now you can finally subscribe.
ain’t nobody got time for that!
For what it’s worth, there is an issue on staying on the same instance when clicking on a different instance’s community and dessalines agreed with the concept, so we might be seeing a change there soon.
I love this. Perfect analogy because it’s literally the same.
Got to say I’m really excited that nobody can own the master instance of say this channel. If some channel goes rogue, there can be easily a competing instance that challenges the top spot. And the same applies to servers themselves. Everyone has to cooperate or you will be excluded.
Ohhhh I kept hearing the email analogy but never WHY it was like email. Thanks for the ELI5!
Great description. Im stealing that one