cross-posted from: https://zemmy.cc/post/17190
This comes to us courtesy of @[email protected]. As a technical person I sometimes find it difficult to communicate with my friends about the value proposition of Lemmy and other federated platforms.
The reality is 99.9% of people are going to instantly tune out the moment they hear “federation”, “decentralized”, or “self-hosted”. These things all existed before the centralized social media hellscape we have today, but those centralized platforms gained dominance because they were able to package their value into a simple pitch: “Your one-stop shop for social!”
Another good example of this is comparing the current state of the official Lemmy website to the official Mastodon website.
Mastodon spends the first 2 page scrolls offering you a visual explanation of what their platform offers, a cohesive and familiar social experience. It’s not until you get 1/3 into the page that you see the words “open source”, and the word “federation” doesn’t even appear in the main copy, it’s used in a user testimonial towards the bottom of the site.
Lemmy’s site on the other hand has an okay paragraph of copy about it’s value proposition, but then spends the first two image tiles and blurbs showing and talking about its source code and infrastructure, with only the third referencing moderator tools.
The following section talks about self-hosting and the fediverse, with only a brief mention to the core value proposition. I could go on about the remainder of the site but by this point it’s likely that the majority of users who weren’t already seeking this and/or are technically inclined have left.
Communicating the value of these things is difficult and something we’re going to need to focus on improving both as platform providers and as users of that platform. That’s why I’m so enamored with this video from Nina. It is quick and to the point, it only communicates what needs to be said for anyone to understand the value prop, and it does so in a way that doesn’t invoke any of the exclusive terminology.
Thank you for coming to my
TED Talkrant.
Yeah, to get regular folks (like, even the nerdy ones for the most part) you have to just drop the jargon entirely. It’s social media / community building, don’t talk about it like a grad school coding project.
If you start drafting the intro / explainer in VSCode so you can easily reference things in the code you already failed.
I think it’s pretty easy to explain it just by saying “the fediverse is a group of small social media sites that work well together. These sites talk to each other, so you can post on any of them with just one account. Usually these sites are ran by small groups of people instead of corporations, so it’s less soul-crushing than Facebook/Tiktok/Twitter/whatever.” No need to go into details about how everything works, the internet is magic to most people anyway. (myself included!)
