It’s been difficult to broach the subject and explain the technical concepts to the average person. I did have some success in first sharing the email comparison, which lead into interoperability.
I’m just curious to hear people’s success stories, if you have any.
I don’t, because it’s my escape from most of their bullshit.
I left Reddit because of their shenanigans. The Tiktok crowd deciding Reddit was cool was what guaranteed I would never go back. Now if anyone asks me if I use social media, I just say “No”.
Why would I tell them about “the fediverse”? Tell them that you use Lemmy or Mastodon or whatever. If they are interested then give them a link to a good instance. That’s it.
Definitely. People don’t care what’s behind. They just want an app or a website.
I send a fiend of mine image macros and shitposts from here
They’re like “WHERE DO YOU GET THESE MEMES”
I say “Lemmy, it’s like Reddit minus so much corpo garb”
They say “the fuck is a lemmy”
I send the link to voyager and say “all you gotta do is sign up on one of these places I think you’d like”
They’re still just on tiktok
I have tried
That’s all you can do 🤷♂️
Fair. I just find it interesting and want to share it. I should just let them decide on their own if it’s something they find interesting or not. I’ll try to remember to just give them an app recommend instead.
I don’t tell people about the Fediverse.
The first rule of the Fediverse.
“It’s like email. You can have an account on Gmail and still send emails to Outlook”.
Edit: just saw that you mentioned email, so that’s usually the easiest analogy.
About success stories, I don’t have many, people I know IRL weren’t interested in Reddit, so Lemmy is the same.
This is literally how I explained it to somebody tonight actually.
I just showed one of my friends the memes on it and they said tell me what this platform is
Nice, you won one.
I just share posts/comments that others find useful
Do you have anything specific, or do you just mean in general?
I would say mostly general, and it also depends on context and relevance
- like I’d send FFXIV memes to my friends who play it but not to anyone else.
For things that people aren’t familiar with but is useful to know (like PC hardware) I tend to share fedi-links as sources/citations after providing context
EX:
- [Powercolor Hellhound RX 7900 XT], [Partner Model 4070 Ti] - Value Comparison
- [ZOTAC 4080 Super], [PowerColor’s Hellhound 7900 XT] - Value Comparison
I’m a nerd
Makes sense, thanks for elaborating. Nerd!
:P
Don’t talk about the high concept of federation, talk about the community that the different services offer.
The classic misstake is to oversell and miss the point that the other party is focusing on.
Don’t: “Lemmy is so awesome, it can’t be shut down, it is federated, you can even run your own instance and have total control”
What the other party hears: “Lemmy is awesome, and you have to do a lot of stuff to join.”
Do: “Hey, have you heard about Lemmy? It is a Reddit clone with a much calmer community, I have had a lot of interesting conversations over there”
This puts the focus on the community rather than the service, people join social networks for the interaction, not the tech.
Anyone I would tell about it is already on it. I don’t usually meet people IRL that are at all interested in anything online.
I usually wait till they complain about something related to one of the big corporate platforms, then throw out a “you know, the fediverse has an ‘X’ now, come join us!” Just replace X with reddit/tumbler/youtube/etc, whatever platform they were complaining about.
Alternatively, I’ll share fediverse links in the process of showing memes to people.
That seems like a good strategy. I should get into more meme communities.
Usually as loudly as possible while wildly gesticulating and showing huge quantities of bloodshot eyeball. Seems effective so far, will continue to report in.
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I usually save the frothing for people who I can tell are really interested, but don’t want to join up for some absurd reason. I don’t know why they would lie about their feelings like that, but a bit of shouting and frothing in a corner really gets them agreeable fast. Great technique!
I’m going to need to see some evidence.
“Reddit rapes us because they control it, not us. This is like that but we control it, not them, libre software. They can get fucked!”
Yes, literally, it works for me. Most people don’t give a shit beyond that, that’s all they need to join. But, start with a chat app first. Also, this is a replacement but they only need to add an app, not replace yet.
What are these “people” to which you refer?
I ask if they’ve heard of mastodon because most people with any ties to the internet have. Then I say there’s a new wave of platforms that are all federated, kinda like how like someone could send an email from a user @aol.clm to a user @msn.com or whatever, which means there’s no real way to centralize the platforms.
Not one person that I’ve told so far has been aware of Mastodon, unfortunately. At this point, if I met someone in real life that actually knew about the Fediverse already, I’d probably shit a brick.
I generally don’t.
@technomad I’ve been keeping a lot of my friends aware of what’s going on in the fediverse (especially around Threads, which they’re more aware of) through a discord channel I run on our server that’s dedicated to what’s going on in the world of tech
Conceptually I prefer using the email analogy for how it actually works since that’s pretty close
Gatekeeping the fediverse isn’t good for it, get people to join up, you have control over what you see
That’s cool that you run a server for your friends.
I’m definitely trying not to be a gatekeeper! Just need to keep trying I suppose, but not be too pushy.