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’d say let them try it and see for themselves.
Experience is the best teacher.
Twitter but with an email address.
like email, your Gmail.account can email.your Outlook account
Just say it is a message board and move on. A tech illiterate wont give a fuck about the inner workings of the site.
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’d guess that the content and the people would be a bigger factor for someone who isn’t very into technology than understanding the underlying concept and architecture.
It’s like Twitter, but anybody is free to spin up their own instance, and they’re all inter-compatible, so any one can view content from any other.
That freedom and openness gives users choice. If one instance owner turns out to be a real dick, the community is able to move off of and blacklist it.
Email is an oft used example. Leaving Gmail doesn’t lock you out of email because you can switch to a different provider or (with enough effort) even run your own email.
what if using your twitter account on the twitter website you could interact with posts from instagram and vice versa.
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.
I’m not “tech illiterate” by any means, but this whole federated thing took me a bit to get my head wrapped around.
I get it now, it’s basically just a bunch of content aggregators in a trench coat, and it doesn’t matter which one you sign up for.
It’s like signing up for Facebook, and getting access to Instagram, LinkedIn, Snapchat, and every other social media site in one place.
As someone who considers themselves tech illiterate I find this explanation is good enough
Mastodon is a social media app, a bit like Twitter, but instead of one company owning the whole thing, it is made of lots of smaller communities that can talk to each other. You join one community, but you can still follow and talk to people on other communities, a bit like how someone with a Gmail address can email someone with an Outlook address.
Find a domain address for one that’s ran by furries because those are the best. Then just use it like Twitter. Don’t worry you can see posts by people who didn’t sign up at your same domain. Have fun
For the illiterate I won’t bother explaining the fine details of federation, just get them to sign up somewhere
A Mastodon instance is one Twitter, but there are many. Through federation they work together to appear as one Twitter.
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 don’t use mastodon, but it doesn’t look harder to use than any other social media. Like a mix between Twitter and Reddit but independent. Join communities you like, see related posts, like or leave a comment.
