Bloonface

Like, ultimately, I have no philosophical objection to Reddit charging for API access. I have an objection to Reddit a) charging ludicrous, unreasonable amounts with the very obvious intention of killing off third party apps and tools and b) repeatedly giving a middle finger to its own userbase, and particularly those who put in unpaid labour to keep the site ticking over.

Unfortunately a) goes against Reddit's express self-interest, and with regards to b) some people are stupid enough or salty enough about having their shitposts removed from places they shouldn't be to actually be on Reddit's side and going "yeah, down with mods!", neglecting to note that the mods are pretty much all that stands between Reddit and a horde of spambots, porn accounts, children, trolls and racists making the site downright unusable.

The absolute best way to explain the fediverse is to not.

When I wrote a short guide to getting started on Mastodon I made deliberate efforts to completely ignore the technical side. The instance stuff does not need explaining. Nobody cares about that. They want to know how to find people to talk to on this Mastodon thing they heard about.

Nobody will tell you to try some chocolate by explaining the entire supply chain for all the ingredients that went into it. They say "try this delicious chocolate bar!" or words to that effect.

If you can't think of a USP for fedi that doesn't revolve around obscure technical details that most people do not and will never give a shit about, and that honestlly are kind of awkward to explain and sometimes even defend, well... I'd suggest going away and trying again.

In general I think decentralisation is significantly oversold as a panacea, and conversely its advocates deliberately ignore that there are pretty concrete advantages to centralisation.

Worse, the advantages to centralisation are almost entirely on the end user experience side - "you can talk to anyone on the service no matter who!", "you only need to register one account!" - while the advantages of decentralisation are all remote and philosophical - "nobody can take it over!", "you can run your own service!". So centralised services will keep winning because they have the best pitch - or, at the very least, servers on decentralised services that become so big and have so many users that they are effectively centralised services all on their own (e.g. Mastodon.social, Kbin).

Most people don't care about philosophical stuff but they do care about having a usable service. It reminds me a bit of Linux advocates who preach the gospel about open source and how bad Microsoft is and how DRM will eat their nans or whatever, but fail to see the glaring issue that for 99% of users Windows works just fine and they don't actually care about anything philosophical, because they see their computer as a tool that plays a minor part in their life, rather than a means of self-actualisation.

That said, I think the best way to explain fediverse is to not. You don't need to tell people all the technical details, you just need to sell them on what they care about. Leading with decentralisation as your USP is a hiding to nothing because most people don't care - "it's a chill place here and you can do XYZ" will work far better. Anyone who cares will find out.