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I think this may be the best explanation of how Mastodon works that I've seen in my 5 months of being here.
https://mattbrown.dev/mastodon/
@sheepnik Love the page! Personally, what helped me the most was comparing it with email providers. People understand that you don't need to be on gmail to send an email to a gmail account.
@sheepnik
It ignores the interconnected-with-the-Fediverse aspect, though: that it doesn't just connect with other Mastodon websites, but websites with much wider purposes, like Peertube, WriteFreely, FunkWhale, Pixelfed, etc.! That is not only an important aspect, but an exciting one!
@dheadshot @sheepnik Where do people go to learn more about this stuff?
I see people talk about these other facets of the fediverse, but how do I get to them, and what do they do? Do they connect with Mastodon? Or are they totally separate networks? Lots of questions...
@hosford42 @sheepnik They should connect fine with Mastodon via the same federation (though some protocols handle the article content differently). For instance: this is a peertube video - https://tilvids.com/w/7pTHGVbQkfPSQKHQufcYi7 . Copy the URL into the Mastodon Searchbox to interact with it through Mastodon.
@hosford42 @sheepnik Most of the Fediverse uses ActivityPub as an underlying protocol, so all those parts of it can be interacted with through Mastodon. Any that don't (Diaspora, older GNU Social servers, some Friendica servers, a few Zot-based things, etc.) can still end up with posts shown on Mastodon as some parts of the Fediverse (Friendica, Hubzilla, etc.) can use multiple protocols and thus reblog those posts into the federated feed.
@dheadshot @sheepnik So from a user perspective, we don't really need to know the difference, because they're all set up to integrate (nearly) seamlessly? That rocks!
@hosford42
Mostly, yes. Some features are specific to that technology (such as Pleroma "reactions" and Peertube "likes"), but generally yes.
@sheepnik
What's better than one single Twitter?
9000+ different Twitter's not owned by one Dr. Evil.
#Mastodon
#ForTheWin
@sheepnik Great-aunt type here, happy on mastodon. . . I kind of landed on a server w/ not much thought about which one, but it seems *fine* mastodon.coffee
@sheepnik love the illistrations but wish it mentioned the fediverse which is one of the most important aspects
I have but one quibble: assure them they can select the node to join with a blindfold and a pin, because it is easy to move.
Like moving to any totally new location, you have to check out the neighbourhood first, but you really won't know until you've been there a while, and you soon learn the other neighbourhoods too.
@sheepnik This is really good but to me the title of the article makes it sound like you’re coming out to your family that you use mastodon lol
@sheepnik but do I really want my parents here?? They kinda ruined FB.
@sheepnik Piero's grandmother is a legend
@sheepnik hey I am someone's great aunt and I'm on here. Rude 
@sheepnik Nice, except the use of the “great-aunt” character… maybe once in a while we could use something that is not sexist or ageist? Like… your technophobe friend? 
@sheepnik @mattbrown what are the websites that have cut themselves off from the Mastodon network?
@mattbrown @sheepnik probably for the best
My explanation is
"It's like email for social media" What your email domain is doesn't really matter and you can switch it if you want.
@sheepnik I'd like to see this, live with good people out here.
@sheepnik It's also the best representation of bolognesi :P
@sheepnik didn't expect the human sacrifice part 
@sheepnik I just know that if I started this conversation with my great aunt her first response would be "what is a website" closely followed by "why am I alive again?"
@sheepnik I'm getting a dns failure over here
@piusbird Ditto the DNS failure.
Greg Cocks @sheepnik broken link :(
@GregCocks I suspect there might be a bit more traffic heading to the site than normal 
@sheepnik @GregCocks There wasn't _that_ much traffic — when you remove all the crawlers there were only about 3,200 visitors in total. And I wrote the thing to be easy on my webserver.
@sheepnik It's just okay. I find it somewhat misleading, because it never explains, nor even mentions ActivityPub, or that Mastodon is just one platform among many interoperable platforms in a much larger federated universe. It's sort of like telling someone the joys of boating without mentioning water.
@sheepnik shame it is so “mastodon” focused rather then fediverse, but also “mastodon” is what people have heard of, so as a simple explanation it works.