• Cardboardboxo@sopuli.xyz
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    15
    ·
    13 hours ago

    “Works just like email” is always easy way to explain. Everyone who uses email understands that they can send a message to a @gmail.com account from a @yahoo.com account or any other server.

    • FizzyOrange@programming.dev
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      6
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      3 hours ago

      Ah yeah just like email. All I had to do to comment here from a different instance was:

      1. “Maybe if I click login it will somehow do federated login?” Nope.
      2. Ok what if I copy the /post/<id> from the URL and paste it in my instance. Nope 404.
      3. Hmm…
      4. Aha! I randomly noticed this text:

      You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: [email protected]

      1. I did that, but it eventually (takes like 10 seconds) came up with a load of random posts and comments from here.
      2. Maybe… if I click on Fediverse memes@feddit.uk - 792 subscribers?

      Success!

      Just like typing in someone@yahoo.com. 🙄

      • Cardboardboxo@sopuli.xyz
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        35 minutes ago

        Well most apps take care of that for you. I’m on a different instance and all I had to do was hit the reply button. For most people setting up the account and choosing server is the hardest part. If I handed someone my phone with an account already made they wouldn’t even know they are viewing and commenting on different servers hosted by different people. They would just think its a different looking reddit clone. But I don’t agree that logging in if your not on your home instance is hard as it requires you to find the post again. Some apps have an option to pull up the post on a different instance but last I checked that’s on an option on the web browser.

    • starman2112@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      8
      ·
      edit-2
      9 hours ago

      The most success I’ve had is just explaining that it’s a social media platform that exists across a variety of websites that all synchronize communities and posts and comments and votes, and you can interact with any of them from any other one

      The problem with the email analogy is that, for most people, email exists as the Gmail app on their phone. It does not occur to them how I can send an email from my Hotmail account to their Gmail account. The moment you say the word protocol, 80% of people’s eyes glaze over

    • Takumidesh@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      17
      ·
      edit-2
      12 hours ago

      I recently came across a scenario where the person I was talking ‘felt uncomfortable’ taking down my email, because it didn’t end in .com. I would be careful when making assumptions about the general population.

      • Robust Mirror
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        7
        ·
        9 hours ago

        I’ve signed up to websites that had entry validation on the email field that flagged not having .com at the end as invalid. Literally someone that should know about technology decided it would be a good idea to make it that way.

        • AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          2 hours ago

          That’s when you write to the domain’s postmaster address to thell them that their shit’s messed up.
          What do you mean, what’s a postmaster?