Never take for granted that "Fediverse" means everything is connected with everything else! CW: long (over 2,600 characters), Fediverse meta, Fediverse-beyond-Mastodon meta
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If you talk about non-Mastodon Fediverse server software, always mention that it's part of the Fediverse.
There are people in the Fediverse who read your message, but who don't know the software that you're talking about, and who don't know that it's in the Fediverse. In addition, there are people on Mastodon who are still fully convinced that "Fediverse" refers to an alleged Mastodon network, that the Fediverse is only Mastodon.
Also, always mention that the software you're talking about is connected to Mastodon. If you say it's in the Fediverse, that doesn't automatically imply for everyone that it's connected to Mastodon.
Case in point: Early this year, there were lots of people who were on both Mastodon and Facebook, and who wanted to migrate away from Facebook. So they created Friendica accounts because they had read somewhere that Friendica is "the Facebook alternative in the Fediverse", and they wanted their friends to move to Friendica, too.
Why didn't they invite their friends to Friendica and follow them from Mastodon instead? Did they want to move away from Mastodon as well and use something better instead? No. Did they want to try Friendica so that they could help their friends with it? No.
No, they moved to Friendica because they thought they'd have to in order to be in touch with other Friendica users. After they had learned that the Fediverse is, in fact, not only Mastodon, that there's also Pixelfed and PeerTube and, well, Friendica, they thought that "Fediverse" refers to a bunch of decentralised networks which, however, are completely isolated from one another. They're all totally different things that run totally different software after all. Mastodon users can only follow Mastodon users, Friendica users can only follow Friendica users. Why should it be any different?
Well, and then someone told them that, in fact, Mastodon and Friendica are connected. Like, you can follow a Friendica user from Mastodon. That was completely unimaginable to them until they tried following their own Friendica account with their own Mastodon account. And they succeeded. So much to their surprise that they stared at the successfully established connection between a Twitter clone and a Facebook alternative like a deer staring at the high beams of your car at night.
To you, it's only natural that "Fediverse" means everything is connected. But to many Mastodon users, this concept is completely alien until you explicitly mention it to them.
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