Most social media are commercial, privately owned, proprietary, centralised, and hence prone to enshittification. If a company will start to make anti-consumer moves to increase profit, most people will be too locked-in and invested to care to switch. Fediverse is a collection of independent instances in one decentralised network, constantly competing with each other with no full monopoly possible, and working under an open and forkable protocol.

Fediverse is social media for nerds.

If they don’t want to come over it’s fine. My mom is still on Facebook. Just let them do whatever they want.

Don’t.

Just say: “this is like Reddit(/Twitter/…), but independent."

They will figure the rest if they have or want to.

I dont want to sound too jaded, but people will sign up for anything without reading the TOS. It’ll be fine, just try to give them the best possible first impression so they stick around.

The practical thing that trips up most people is the wealth of possible servers to register with. Give your friends a leg up and give them a signup link to a reliable, friendly instance you think will fit them (probably one you’re already on).

Just give people a low-friction way in, let them get a feel of the fediverse/a specific, local feed. In my experience over-evangelising the nuts and bolts only turns them off the whole concept.

I think we often try to sell the fediverse too hard on the technical and idealist perspectives. Yes, federation is great and, yes, isn’t it lovely that there is no manipulative algorithm, or no billionaire can buy it out and build it into his failed space exploration empire?

But the majority of internet users don’t care about those things. Even for those that do, it’ll be way down their priority list.

A picture is worth a thousand words. The Fediverse :

Based on how my conversations have gone, I’d just skip explaining the federation part entirely. Most people don’t care

I’d just say it’s like Reddit, but more friendly and less addictive. Sell that they’ll get all the important news and memes, but without the ads, bots, and garbage content shoved in their faces

I’d also pick a home server for them and help them set it up, lemmy.world is probably good as a default if they’re coming from mainstream socials

Truth is, most people really don’t care how it works. They just want it to work, and their first impression shouldn’t be choice overload or a data dump

“It’s an alternative to {insert service here}, but if a feature of the platform, an administration, its userbase, etc., are a problem, you can easily find alternatives without abandoning the whole network. Do keep backups of your communities though!”

Also would need to rewrite to not sound as technical, but features-wise, I’d recommend Mbin, Friendica or, once it matures more, PieFed, since all 3 are overarching, being able to access Reddit-like posts, Twitter-like posts, and those compatible with either.

As others have said, just don’t bring it up unless specifically asked.

Most users won’t care, and you might easily overwhelm them with data.

It is far better to introduce them to Lemmy/Piefed/mbin/kbin/Pixelfed/etc as a specific service, and answer further questions as they come up.

Send them this link https://fediverse.info/

Who you’re trying to invite over?
You don’t. That’s established relationship shit (romantic or otherwise).

It’s like _____, but it sucks. But like, in a good way. Like the old Internet. It sucked, but that’s what made it so good.

I think this does a good job https://fediverse.info/

It’s like reddit but without the numbers and without most of the hate. Who cares about the tech side?

“It’s like other social media, but it was made by communist nerds to be free, no ads, no spying, no government ID, no psychological manipulation. And it’s all open and connected, so you can see posts from other websites and upvote and comment on them.”