The problem is people think it’s email. I don’t blame them, they hear the word email and they think email.
They don’t think or hear the technical explanation and workings of: “Anyone can run their own email server, and federate by accepting emails from other email servers.” It’s not how the vast, vast majority of people work.
Why do they need to? We hide the technical and inner workings of most things, because half the population is too stupid to understand it. It doesn’t mean they can’t use it. Look at lemmy for instance. I’d be willing to bet 99% of the people here couldn’t set up a lemmy instance for themselves.
??? That’s exactly what I’m saying. We don’t need to explain the inner workings with comparisons to email. Just tell them to browse or make an account.
But people need something to compare it to. They don’t know why the fediverse is something they should want.
The email comparison is to explain that they can participate anywhere, it’s not to fundamentally portray the inner workings of it; but just to approximate it on a surface level.
Kind of like saying “Facebook is kinda like Myspace”…it wasn’t Myspace, and we’re not asking people understand the technical differences, but there has to be some sort of starting-off point.
I explain to people that it’s like Twitter, but if twitter acted like email where you could sign up with any provider.