For now, i don’t know how to explain it and make it comprehensible to tech illiterate, let alone incite them to give a try for longer than the very short term.
If you are yourself a tech illiterate, which method worked for you?
If the tech illiterate is someone you know, which method was successful to convince them?
I guess it depends how tech illiterate they are and where their confusion stems from, but as long as they know what email is, then I like to explain anything in the fediverse by using email as an analogy:
You know how, with email, you don’t have to care about whether the person you email is using Gmail or Apple or Yahoo or whatever? Email is the kind of message you send, and whoever gets it can use any email app to look at it and reply to you.
(Insert federated platform name here) works the same as email. You want to post or reply on (Insert federated platform name here)? Use whatever client you like, and it doesn’t matter if the people you’re communicating with use the same client.
It’s not strictly a perfect analogy, but it’s close enough to get over the usual confusion where people have been conditioned by corporate social networks to expect services to have one and only one blessed app.
I’ve found that most people understand that signing up for an email service like Gmail allows them to communicate with people who aren’t on Gmail. Tie that in to explaining federation.
“Mastodon is kind of the same idea, but for social media.”
Obviously the technical details are different, but it helps explain federation at a very high level. Then you can talk about why that’s valuable for longevity of a system.
Example: the decline of Yahoo and AOL as email providers didn’t end email as a technology because email doesn’t depend on those companies existing to function.
I think that we get stuck too much on how it works. We need to step back and ask ourselves what we are trying to explain.
The goal here is to have them try out a new social media. The media looks, feels and behaves like twitter. So the only explanation needed is “it’s like twitter”
You can then add what differentiate it from twitter “it’s open source” “it’s not controlled by big tech” “there are no ads” “it’s good a blocking nazi content (ymmv)”
IMHO advertising the decentralized “like email” nature of mastodon as a starting point is counter productive.
I would consider myself 100% tech illiterate and I have a hard time figuring out this website I’m on right now and what it even is. And there’s like hundreds just like this. Or something. No advice just yapping.
Then return to read the comments, maybe you learn something new. Also you can point out which ones make it easier to understand for you.
Tell them it works like email, which it kinda does
A Mastodon instance is one Twitter, but there are many. Through federation they work together to appear as one Twitter.
You know how you and your friends with different email services can still email each other?
Now imagine all the messages you “email” back & forth are instead messages you’ve posted on a message board, and anybody can read & reply
To address another complex matter if they ever ask:
You know how your email service can help sort or block spam in your incoming email? Hosts of one message board service can filter/block other particular people’s/services’ messages from showing up to your feed, too
Similar to what other comments have said, we created this page to go over the basic analogy to email and phone numbers:
https://fedecan.ca/en/guide/get-started
For the people who are really unfamiliar with tech, I research an instance for them and make a recommendation. All they need to do is make an account as they usually do.
The best analogy for anything in the fediverse is “it’s like email where you dont need to have an account with the same company as someone to talk to them”.
For Mastodon specifically, it’s just the Twitter equivalent of that.
