What if we described federation as syncing?
I personally think the email analogy does little to help.
What if federation is described as posts, comments and votes syncing between servers? This could make more sense to some people, and make it easier to explain some federation quirks ("this server stopped this other server from syncing with it", "Votes differ slightly between instances because they are still syncing")
What do you think?
It's still technical jargon. IMO best to avoid even basic technical explanations and focus on functional descriptions.
Something along the lines of "the fediverse is designed so no single person can can buy out the whole social network, no matter how much capital they have available."
Sure, but this doesn't explain all the different servers, and how they interact.
I think most people understand that there is multiple lemmy websites, but they don't seem to know that they are interoperable. Most people assume they are all islands.
Maybe describe it as a network with shared posts and userbase?
I do that already.
Have you seen this thread? https://old.reddit.com/r/BuyFromEU/comments/1j0xkqa/lemmy_as_an_alternative_to_reddit_using/
People seemed to get the analogy
I don't see many people actually discussing the email analogy in the comments. This could indicate that people get the analogy, but you also stressed that "the same content is accessible from every server", and gave links to a ton of instances, which I think is more useful for onboarding.
I agree that the email analogy, though technically accurate, isn't very useful.
"Syncing" is better, but not perfect.
What about words like "interconnected" or "part of a shared network"?
What's the issue with the email analogy ?
I mean, we can even use phone providers "you can call your friends even if they have a different provider", but that's the same than email
I think the issue is that the use cases for email and Reddit vastly different, and so saying "Lemmy is like Reddit but also email" can be confusing to new users.
Saying something like "you can participate in almost all the sublemmys no matter which Lemmy website you sign up at" would be more useful.
The email analogy is fine to explain "what is federation?", but new users don't need to understand how federation works in order to try out Lemmy.
Sure, but people don't understand how they are interconnected. Part of a shared network means nothing to an average joe.