Test1, mentioning a user at a different nodebb server @mrcs@isurg.org

@eeeee user slugs are always lower case. @mrcs@isurg.org didn't get the notification? That's odd.

@omega @Kichae @baris @julian

I think the only problem here is you assume people should be able to "grok" it.

I don't think that's a problem. I think people should be able to understand that the Internet is a communications platform. Growing up on IRC isn't a requirement to intuiting this; the point there was that I people understood it there and then.

People should be able to understand it here and now, too. They've just been trained otherwise.

This topic cracks me up. Maybe it's just me.

@kichae@catodon.social said in Explaining the fediverse is a hard problem.:
> People should be able to understand it here and now, too. They've just been trained otherwise.

I never understood the implication here as in the how they've been trained otherwise.

omega said in Explaining the fediverse is a hard problem.:
> never understood the implication here as in the how they've been trained otherwise.

What I was saying is that the internet has become incredibly centralized, and compartmentalized, to the point where people now think that the idea of a network seems foreign. People struggle with federated services because they see the website they're using as a dumb terminal to access "Mastodon" or "Lemmy" or whatever, viewing it as a centralized resource that exists in a singular, concrete place.

That's how Facebook works. That's how Twitter works. Their phones and laptops are simple pass-throughs. It's all they know, and because of this, peoples imaginations have been limited.

Sociologists call this habitus.

Kichae

That's a great reply. Thanks.

I think we covered some of those points along the way on this topic. What I got most from your dense sumamry is a maybe a new analogy that dovetails with your outlook.

The base of communications is to talk one on one.

Those of us who lived in the before and just on the edge of all this great tech, imagined the future, from sci-fi to whatever, as a collective envision, not nesscarily of our own authorship but it inspired, but ultimately the inspiration to improve things comes from the reality of reality - The starting state of human communications, Is essentially the voice vis a vis language.
(let's exclude a punch to the head as the most base form).

One to one or a small group, a family, father to children requires Normal voice no modulation (until they climb the pitch to the cookie jar, requiring, modulation!) and this is the base unit of society.

ONow you need to speak to a class, you need to speak a little differently but again it is still vocal.

Now a hall or gymnasium full of people, well depending on your voice you can probably be heard by most, practice and modulation come into play but you are unassisted and do fine. As long as the noise to signal ratio remain 99% or higher everyone should hear you.

Beyond this say a large outdoor crowd, technological assistance in the form of a megaphone or sound system is required. The people many meters back can now hear you. Great you speaking to 5000 people and they get what you are saying. This is breakpoint 1. If it requires power. Where technology assist in increasing the reach of the voice.

Moving on.

Now you're in a stadium, your pitching you political vision to 50,000 people, the sound system is awesomly capable, everyone can hear you and you even have large TV screens behind so people can also see you.

Breakpoint 2

Oh and guess what, there are 5 local TV stations and 4 coast to coast TV station all with camera crew, they are broadcasting your rally to about 100 million viewer lives. Across 20 different networks.

Since this political rally is really popular the speaker is well know. Networks across them world have picked up the live feed from the group of stations or networks and syndicated it live to the rest of the world.

Breakpoint 2, That's federation!

A forum already has a few easy to understand analogues in life and throughout history, it's in the name.

Federation, no, but Breakpoint 2 I think actually nails it best, it even captures the reality the mass audience do not need to know how it all works, once they have a TV set/box/sub that can pick it up, they're good.

Now you say this is only one way, well, now that we all have our own forum, we have our own stadium, and in theory we can all attend each other rallies, as a conversation. Crazy.

All internet tech would exist in breakpoint 2 naturally. That's the habitat.

Thinking a little further for the sake of argument and discussion, I think there are more breakpoints, maybe open to debate.

Breakpoint 3

I think breakpoint 3 is global regulation or large regulatory blocs, EU, US, China and so on. This is an older form of centralisation.That is currently trying to reassert its position versus breakpoint 2 technological scale to dominate it and try put it in a defined box.

Breakpoint 4

Exo-WWW off terra - Starlink being the obvious, this would seem like a next reaction to Breakpoint 3.

Should we then not be using the term syndication / network-syndication, or is that already to attached to other existent WWW technologies?

omega Honestly, I don't think the basics of federation are that big of a problem for people. The idea is simple enough, it's just that it's kind of unthinkable for most folks in the current internet paradigm.

"Imagine if you could follow stuff on Twitter, and talk to Twitter users, from Facebook".

That captures the whole promise. The whole idea. And it's aided by the fact that Facebook and Twitter are so very obviously different things. Different companies. Different websites. Different apps. Different services.

They look different, they're labelled different, their apps are different, etc. And it would be understandable that if they did communicate between them, that there might be some rough edges.

Now look at mastodon.social, mstdn.social, and mstdn.ca.

They look the same.

Try lemmy.ml, lemm.ee, and startrek.website.

They look the same.

The fediverse has adopted "make every website look like a dumb terminal" as a design aesthetic, and "the website you use doesn't matter" as a recruitment philosophy. And it just doesn't work.