I don’t. I passively mention lemmy when I’m discussing my activities, and if they show interest I go into further detail. They have never shown an interest past “Whats a lemmy”

“Imagine if social media were run by the people who use it instead of corporations selling ads through engagement at all costs.”

I would not talk about the technical aspects of the fediverse at all. Most people genuinely don’t care and they’ll immediately ignore everything else you say if you start talking about what federation is.

Instead, the best introduction is to talk about what they will directly experience if they use the fediverse. I would say something like, it’s basically reddit/twitter, but with no ads and not run by a corpo.

It’s also a good idea to share content without additional context whenever possible. Just send them a link to an interesting post. The more people get used to seeing interesting content on Lemmy, Masto, etc., the more likely they are to think it’s not “weird” and maybe make an account to comment on something.

Me: Imagine reddit for left wing, privacy obsessed, Linux nerds.

Anyone else: I really don’t want to.

/scene

I say it’s like Reddit but with more Star Trek and less everything else.

Before anything, I would check if there is an active community they are actually interested in, and give them that. Otherwise, there’s really not much reason why they should use it. It would be like gifting someone a box full of manga to someone who is not interested in Japanese stuff. I’m saying this because a lot of people including OP seems to think decentralisation/federation/FOSSness are some major selling points to a lot of people, but it really isn’t. Content usually is.

It even applies to you too. If an instance banned you for mentioning Linux or FOSS, you wouldn’t really care that they were running open-source Lemmy, you would ditch that instance. If that happened with every instance, you wouldn’t use Lemmy at all.

I use email as an analogy. Most non-tech people are familiar with the idea of there being different email providers so I use that concept to describe the fediverse.

I share posts they’ll like.

Or tell them about communities I’ve found I think they’ll like.

If they ask how to participate I pick an instance for them and just link them direct to the signup page, then show them how to sign in in an app.

That way there is basically no jargon. No complexity. If they sign up, they do so out of genuine interest for the content. If they ask what federation is, I explain. But the neat thing is, you don’t really need to know about it to have a good experience on the fediverse.

Plus when people see the @ with a url, they kinda just naturally get that it’s like email. They notice that it’s part of a users “address” and that it differentiates users, but they don’t really think about it past that.

Us being here for ideological reasons is extremely unusual. Most people don’t make decisions that way.

Besides. If you find good content FIRST and sign up to engage with it second, it is so much easier to become and remain a regular user.

It’s (insert platform here) for furries, communists and nerds. If I want to explain the basic concept, I talk in terms of phone carriers

It’s like existing social media they are familiar with except there’s multiple versions run independently which are connected together using a shared protocol.

I just message them links using simpleX messenger that they don’t use.

I still don’t really understand it tbh. I just know it’s not a corpo and I’ve never seen an ad on it, and for me those are wins

Got my first ad (or at least, the first I noticed) after submitting this. How ironic

I think the best way is just talking about an individual instance