I personally think the email analogy does little to help.
What if federation is described as posts, comments and votes syncing between servers? This could make more sense to some people, and make it easier to explain some federation quirks (“this server stopped this other server from syncing with it”, “Votes differ slightly between instances because they are still syncing”)
What do you think?
It’s still technical jargon. IMO best to avoid even basic technical explanations and focus on functional descriptions.
Something along the lines of “the fediverse is designed so no single person can can buy out the whole social network, no matter how much capital they have available.”
Sure, but this doesn’t explain all the different servers, and how they interact.
I think most people understand that there is multiple lemmy websites, but they don’t seem to know that they are interoperable. Most people assume they are all islands.