ElisaNov 13, 2022
Here's a half-baked thought about the twitter migration that I've been ruminating these past days:

It's become very clear that basic concepts of FOSS and federation, or even interoperability, are completely alien to most people. And I don't blame them.
Most of us were trained to think in brand silos, where platforms quietly define what we can or cannot do. The app stores limit which software we can run on our own frikkin devices, or who we can talk with.
Show threadElisaNov 13, 2022
Our whole digital experience is appified: The sentiment "I'm not online, I'm just on Facebook" that emerged in the late 2000s leads directly to today, where we sort our digital social interactions in the logic of tech companies. "What's your whatsapp" or imessage or whatever is now synonymous with our phone numbers or email addresses. We're used to being limited by our tech choices in every respect. If those limits are suddenly lifted, it's disorienting.
Show threadjk
@eliza so "just like email" is the best way to explain the fediverse?
Nov 13, 2022 at 4:10pmWeb
Show threadElisaNov 13, 2022

@jk no, because a) no-one is even slightly interested in how email works and b) given the market share of gmail it's not even true anymore.

But really, why reference stuff? Why not have a naming and narrative that's consistent with the user experience? I mean, "instance" is admin talk.

Show threadphnx, abandoned accountNov 13, 2022
@eliza @jk agreed. Honestly, most of the time we really don't need to get too far into how things work... Humans interact with extremely complicated tech they don't remotely understand all the time; all we need is a metaphor that shows just enough to make it "work" for the user, most of the couldn't care less about peeking behind the curtain and that's not necessarily wrong or bad.