this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2024
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Fediverse
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Dude gets it.
I also think the term Fediverse is to esoteric and Social web is perfect for the masses.
It’s a term for insiders. My mother will never talk about “the fediverse.”
The “Open Social Web” is a much better term. It tells you everything you need to know.
It just sounds really dumb. The word "federation" was right there.
A little too long and generic. I think Fediverse is fine as long as we treat it as a name and don't force people to necessarily understand what it means. People understand names, they're the most human thing there is
Like the Internet.
The First Person to Ever Have A Name!
Oh, man, I hadn't heard the "it's like email" nonsense since I stopped daily driving Mastodon. Real nostalgia going on here.
What makes it nonsense?
Well, for one, like the guy says below, it was often said to people as a means to explain how federation works, which immediately failed by way of people not thinking about or knowing how email works, either.
For another, my emails look like emails everywhere, both on source and destination. I don't have a different character limit or feature set about what I can slap into my emails depending on what client I'm using, and I'm reasonably sure my email looks the same on the other end, no mater what client the recipient is using.
So the back end may work like email (not really, but it may approximate it), but the front end sure as hell doesn't, so the explanation is more confusing than anything else.
Also, not the part of Mastodon specifically that people didn't understand, they just tried to log in, were presented with a thousand instances, told choosing which one to use was super important but also that it didn't matter and they should keep changing instances later, but also that migrating instances was not an easy process, but don't worry, it's just like email.
It was a hilarious endless loop of a conversation, like a Monty Python sketch. Or seeing people try to tell normies to use Linux.
This is mostly the case now due to centralized email by a few providers and bountiful bandwidth, but it was certainly not the case 20+ years ago.
People used to do the same with email before google and microsoft dominated email. It's just that in most cases, your ISP provided you with an email when you first signed up. Switching email provider currently is way more onerous than switching mastodon or lemmy providers.
Do people know how email works?