The email comparison is good, if you focus on what is actually being compared and not anything else about emails.
That’s the exact problem, people think about emails. You know, addresses and inbox and CC. They don’t focus on or know or understand the technical comparison. They’ve never had to think about it before. It’s the exact wrong way to try to introduce them to fediverse. Don’t even say fediverse, just say Lemmy or whatever else.
The fediverse is like how you can send an email from your work to your personal account because the two email servers have a way to talk to each other. It isn’t like Facebook or Instagram where you can only send messages to people on the same platform.
How is that not a good analogy?
The analogy certainly worked for me when I first read up on it. “Oh, different servers speaking the same language so they can communicate even though they’re separate entities”.
I imagine the only people who are really confused by it are the ones who simply cannot grasp analogies in general.
Because it explains the stuff regular users don’t care about.
Why would they care which server has the content they want to see? They don’t do so now. They just want the content.
Call it a free social media with no ads or algorithms. And you will get a much better response.
Ok I’ve explained this twice, so this will be my last attempt. Because people hear the word “email” and upon hearing the word “email” they, wait for it, think it’s email. You know, the email they’ve used for 20 years. Once they hear the word “email” they stop hearing anything else. They heard the word “email” and have automatically filled in the rest with their experiences of typing “dear madam blah blah blah best regards” and CC this person so they can see it. They have filled it in with their user experience. They have never thought about the inner workings of email with servers or intercommunication.
People do not need to know about the inner workings of email or lemmy in order to use them. Trying to explain the inner workings before they even start is entirely unnecessary. And trying to explain with a different service like email is even worse, well because of what I wrote above. It confuses them.
Because you’re not sending messages to other people, you’re posting on an open forum. The user experience is totally different to email.