How would you explain Lemmy/Kbin to a Reddit person or to a social media person?
Trying to "recruit" more folks in Kbin but I think I lack enough information to describe Kbin effectively.
"It's like Reddit but it's in the fediverse world. It's a new thing, gaining speed fast and it has less chances to get corrupted because of the fediverse thingie compared to Reddit (lol)!"
I just told my friends that the federation is like the states in a country. They exist independently, abide by similar, but specific rules and allow you to travel between each other without friction.
It’s a federated reddit alternative. The most I’ve ever had to elaborate is to clarify that “federated” basically means “decentralized.” I’ve never tried to explain it to someone who can’t figure it out from that.
I just start with “It’s basically just a community owned Reddit” and leave it at that.
I think that gets the important point across. Getting into details about federation and picking servers just makes it sound complicated, when it really isn’t.
Then if someone’s interested I just recommend them a larger server and let them go from there.
I think people way over complicate things from the start and turn people off before they even try it.
In layman’s terms, comparing it to email seems the easiest way to explain.
“It’s like a distributed Reddit with a bunch of instances that are run by different people, and they all talk to one another. Some people have an email address with gmail.com, some have yahoo.com, some have protonmail.com, etc, but they can all email one another. Lemmy instances share each others’ posts in a similar way.”
This is also how I explain it… It’s crazy how all these centralized services have made something as old and simple as email seem foreign to people. I’ll explain it this way, and still get something like, “but this is a website”. To which I say “so is gmail.com”
It’s like multiple reddit sites, but they all work the same and the content and users are synced between them. So you can pick any one of them, follow topics and contact users from all of them, and if one site goes haywire we just ignore or block it and move on.
That’s how I explain it as well. It’s better than the email analogy I see all the time. Obviously using reddit as an example only works if the person you’re talking to knows what reddit is. Otherwise, I just change it to something they know (i.e. facebook, discord, etc.)
It’s like Reddit was before they started trying to monetize it and screw over the better apps. It’s probably impossible for it to get screwed up like Reddit did. Fewer users, though, for better or for worse.
Activity pub and the feddiverse are literally the email of social media. Everyone uses email and has a basic grip on it. You at gmail.com can mail someone at hotmail.com and vice versa. So the host you choose doesn’t really matter much.
Mastodon and other similar clients give you a classic twitter like experience. With linear feeds and no algorithms to manipulate what you see. What you want to see is what you will see.
Lemmy and other similar clients give you a reddit like interface. Again with no complex manipulative algorithms. And the ability for much better moderated and curated experience than reddit.
Peertube gives you a YouTube like interface and focuses on video content.
Pixelfed is a Google photos or similar interface focusing on images.
They’re all activity pub. And can even interoperate. You can post to Lemmy from mastodon etc. Though that’s a bit more advanced currently.
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