- cross-posted to:
- technology
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I thought this quote was equal parts amusing and depressing
I joined Mastodon this week, and it took a few hours just to master its new vocabulary. Some of it is a little silly-sounding: instead of tweets, you have “toots”. Things get trickier after that. Mastodon is not a single website but a network of thousands of websites called “instances”, also called servers. These servers are “federated”, which means they are run by different entities but can still communicate with each other without needing to go through a central system. And the space they all exist in is called the “fediverse”, which some savvy tooters call “the Fedi”.
We’ve now got to the point where an idea of a distributed network with a bunch of sites on it is an alien concept to most people. This is literally how the internet was meant to work before it got taken over by megacorps.
Good read, thanks!
Yeah, getting straight with the new lingo and how things work in federated social media takes a bit of time, but I remember trying to figure out corporate social media when it first caught on, and it’s about equal.
Agreed, and there are definitely things that can be done to make the fediverse more accessible to non-technical users. The kind of perspective the article gives is very useful to see what people struggle with and what edges need to be sanded to get more people to move off corporate platforms.