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Comment by dugite-code | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure I understand why there is any confusion regarding Mastodon. If you understand email you understand Mastodon instances... where is the confusion?

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I’m not sure I understand how tech folks can’t contemplate the obvious confusion the average person would have around something like Mastodon. The vast majority of people don’t even understand what an “instance” is in this context without an explanation. Most people _don’t_ understand how email servers, SMTP, etc work.

> Most people _don’t_ understand how email servers, SMTP, etc work.

Yeah, I have explained to my dad many times that he can check the same email account from his tablet and his PC but he just doesn't get it. To him, his gmail is only on his tablet and his Comcast email is only on his PC and that's that.

On a simpler level everyone "gets" that their work email ends with @company.tld and their personal ends with @gmail.com. Heck we all say "at" for @ so it's easy to grasp that signing up for that involves going to these domains.

Hell I explained this to my elderly mother and she got the idea straight away. So no I don't see how the confusion is obvious.

Yep, from experience this is the way. No talk about federation and instances, just “your account is at somewhere” and choosing where is a social question not a technical one.

And acknowledge that social questions are messy. “Which cafeteria table should I sit at?”

I for one am very confused about the excitement about Mastodon, and your comment made even me more so.

Is comparing Mastodon to email a good comparison? Isn't email a protocol and isn't Mastodon a piece of software?

SMTP is to Postfix as ActivityPub is to Mastodon. If you're not technical enough to care about the distinction between protocol and implementation (as most users are not), then the distinction is largely academic. You can register on a server running Mastodon and communicate with anyone on any other server running Mastodon or with anyone on any server running any of the other ActivityPub implementations (Pleroma, Misskey, etc).

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