The email analogy is bad and needs to end. People hear email and think it’s like email, they don’t hear the technical how-it-works.

People don’t need to know the inner workings to use it. Just tell them it’s social media. If you need more, say it’s lots of different servers that talk to each other.

The email comparison is good, if you focus on what is actually being compared and not anything else about emails.

That’s the exact problem, people think about emails. You know, text and addresses and inbox and CC. They don’t focus or know or understand the technical comparison. They’ve never had to think about it before. I’s the exact wrong way to try to introduce them to fediverse. Don’t even say fediverse, just say Lemmy or whatever else.

The fediverse is like how you can send an email from your work to your personal account because the two email servers have a way to talk to each other. It isn’t like Facebook or Instagram where you can only send messages to people on the same platform.

How is that not a good analogy?

Ok I’ve explained this twice, so this will be my last attempt. Because people hear the word “email” and upon hearing the word “email” they, wait for it, think it’s email. You know, the email they’ve used for 20 years. Once they hear the word “email” they stop hearing anything else. They heard the word “email” and have automatically filled in the rest with their experiences of typing “dear madam blah blah blah best regards” and CC this person so they can see it. They have never thought about the inner workings of email with servers or intercommunication.

People do not need to know about the inner workings of email or lemmy in order to use them. Trying to explain the inner workings before they even start is entirely unnecessary. Trying to explain it is not necessary. And trying to explain with a different service like email is even worse, well because of what I wrote above.

A comparison isn’t bad just because some people have trouble with listening to the end of a sentence.

The explanation is bad. When you lead people into things that you really should know they will automatically fill in with their prior experiences.

That is true of absolutely every comparison.

Compare it social media and they will fill it in with their experiences with social media. Infinitely better and more accurate for the user experience. Alright I think I’m out.

Except social media platforms don’t communicate with each other, which is the reason for the email comparison.

Congratulations on coming out!