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this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2023
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Any time I talk about decentralized apps to friends and family I come across as some kind of conspiracy driven weirdo. I do not understand why decentralization comes across as some kind of extreme radical movement. I'm not protesting or anything, everything else just sucks lol
Maybe use familiar terms? Skip the tech jargon, and go straight to things like "Reddit and Twitter and Facebook are boring old media with crappy apps and adds everywhere; the cool kids are now hanging out on Mastadon and Lemmy". But you have to really own it.
"Decentralized" means nothing to most people, or worse has been associated with crypto scams, and the stereotypical Bitcoin proselytizer. The truth is, most people can't handle all that information.
You have to appeal to emotion. Statements like "decentralization prevents interference by third parties... Blablabla" will just go over people's heads if they can't relate to an abstract concept. Say something like "My family/friends in /country/ can't buy anything with their local currency because of hyperinflation, so now they all us USD or even Bitcoin" instead. That will appeal to people's emotions.
In the case of the fediverse an appeal to emotion might look like "Reddit has just turned to shit. It's not the platform I first joined. A lot of us have moved to Lemmy and it reminds us of when we first joined Reddit."
Also, just don't push the subject. Some people are not ready to follow you. Let people figure out the benefits at their own pace. Otherwise they get defensive, and you'll do more to make yourself look like a crazy from that place than to convince.
Also there's two facts that can be used to our advantage: the internet started out non-corporate and decentralized, and it's the for-profit corporate nature of these companies that's causing the enshittification. So you can just say that you like stuff that goes back to the old good days of the internet and don't like being under the control of greedy corporations.
It's because everything is buzzwords these days. They just think decentralized is another buzzword rather than a legitimate descriptor. I blame crypto.
I try to stick to the email analogy, most people have seen email threads distributed across users on a bunch of mailservers. Don't even have to touch the d-word
Do you think "instance" is a bad word to use for the different Lemmy servers? My wife thinks so, but I'm not sure what a better word would be to use other than maybe just "server", but that also feels too techy. I do think "community" is a good non-technical word to use for the equivalent of subreddits.
Not the guy you replied to, but to me personally the word instance comes across as technical, considering how its used in programming
Not too sure if there's a normal sounding alternative, defo could benefit from a non-techie perspective here 🤔
Ha we had the same thought tho
"Server" has been pretty normalized (albeit abused) by discord especially, so it seems accessible to me?
"Instance" does seem vague and overly techy to me, it's an oop/code term (think "instantiate the class") that's been borrowed for casual use.
"Community=subreddit" sounds pretty good, but runs the risk of being misinterpreted as more of a "community = discord server" thing...
I'm also fond of matrix's "homeserver", a server that (while your home) isn't your only location, but that might be entirely foreign to new users too.
Definitely a tricky problem
Crypto is decentralized, though. It's an honest way of describing it. I think that more to blame are the specific crypto users who gave it a "bad name" with their shenanigans and equally the people who took that as an excuse to dump on crypto in general.
Yeah I should have been clearer, it would have been more accurate to say I blame cryptobros.
I've been trying to tell my friends about the fediverse and how happy I am using it and why I deleted my twitter account etc etc. Every time I bring it up I feel like it's very quickly dismissed as this weird nerdy thing that only I care about.
Some people only join stuff that seems mainstream and cool. You can chart Twitter growth with fans of Oprah and Donald Trump joining: before Oprah it was absolutely a nerdy thing, after I was surprised how many random average people from all walks of life had shown up. I'm talking like startup bros to fast food cashiers overnight.