I'm deep into this shit, so I admit I'm not a good judge, but federation as a concept seems to me about as complicated as the idea that we all have different clocks that show the same time; but still, in discussions about mastodon adoption I keep seeing this same performative bewilderment, like "what's 'federation', probably a complicated NERD thing and I'm NOT a nerd so I'll stick with twitter/fb." people refusing to understand before even trying to understand. why is this/how to mitigate?
@aparrish TBH, a big part of the problem is that, well, federation *doesn't matter*. Not as something an end-user needs to care about during their first introduction to how Mastodon works, anyway.
I mean, when you teach someone how to use e-mail, do you do a deep dive on SMTP first? Do we expect people to know what DNS is and how BGP works before they type "google.com" into a web browser? Of course not.
@aparrish So I think you're right about their being a performative aspect to this whole "I don't get this weird term, I'm out" phenomenon, but there's also a fundamental issue with how Mastodon is explained and pitched to people.
You join a small community but you can still talk to people in other communities. That's a 100% accurate (if shallow) description, but it doesn't offer any new terminology for anybody to get hung up on.