It may depend on the background of who you're talking to. Programmers may be very comfortable with diffs, but non-programmers (in my case, physics graduate students) usually aren't. On the other hand, everybody is familiar with snapshots: even high school student will end up with "report_v1.docx", "report_v2.docx", etc, which are snapshots at the file level (and work reasonably well as long as you have a consistent scheme and don't need branches). I've also routinely seen less-technical people organize their research / paper writing by making a weekly snapshot of their work folder ("project-2020-04-1"). Telling these people that git basically does the same thing for them automatically with a tree-like "labeling scheme" that allows for branches tends to go over quite well, in my experience. For actually programmers, I'd be inclined to give them a more technical introduction to git's internals. I'd still point out that git stores compressed snapshots, not diffs (especially if they're older and may have previous SVN experience)