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?

Because you’re not sending messages to other people, you’re posting on an open forum. The user experience is totally different to email.