Some people really can’t grok this. I remember trying to explain Diaspora to a friend several years ago, and he said “Yeah, but if Diaspora got as big as Facebook, then they would turn evil, too!”
I had to patiently re-explain how instances work, but I still don’t think he got it. We’ve been living with big corporations running the Web for so long that some people can’t even imagine it being any different, and that’s scary.
lt was so easy for me, personally. I have to reassert my own biases everytime I talk to someone about federation because it just makes sense to me. Its equivalent to a bunch of email servers talking to each other. I can send an email to whoever I want, as long as my provider has not blocked them or I myself have not. Picking an instance is like picking gmail/outlook/yahoo.
How well does that explanation work? When a bunch of people were migrating to Mastodon last year, I remember some were still very confused, even after the comparison to email.
With enough time and enough pressure, I think that the vast majority of people would figure it out, though. They figured out email, and if you tried to explain that to anybody in 1990, they would’ve looked at you like you had an extra head.
Tbh its hit or miss, and I’m all out after that. I’m too deep in the tech sauce to return my brain to 0 and explain it from the outside. So when people don’t get it after that I often just leave them to their walled gardens.
Some people really can’t grok this. I remember trying to explain Diaspora to a friend several years ago, and he said “Yeah, but if Diaspora got as big as Facebook, then they would turn evil, too!”
I had to patiently re-explain how instances work, but I still don’t think he got it. We’ve been living with big corporations running the Web for so long that some people can’t even imagine it being any different, and that’s scary.
lt was so easy for me, personally. I have to reassert my own biases everytime I talk to someone about federation because it just makes sense to me. Its equivalent to a bunch of email servers talking to each other. I can send an email to whoever I want, as long as my provider has not blocked them or I myself have not. Picking an instance is like picking gmail/outlook/yahoo.
How well does that explanation work? When a bunch of people were migrating to Mastodon last year, I remember some were still very confused, even after the comparison to email.
With enough time and enough pressure, I think that the vast majority of people would figure it out, though. They figured out email, and if you tried to explain that to anybody in 1990, they would’ve looked at you like you had an extra head.
Tbh its hit or miss, and I’m all out after that. I’m too deep in the tech sauce to return my brain to 0 and explain it from the outside. So when people don’t get it after that I often just leave them to their walled gardens.