agnos.is Forums

I do agree that the term "federation" and the use of the verb "to federate" (with its even weirder bastard cousin "defederate", which is not even a real word) is very unfortunate. It would be great to have a shorter and more fitting term. Something normal people would connect with more easily.

I find it especially problematic because its a word that translates poorly, at least in Danish. The Danish word for "federation" can also be used to mean an organization or association, which leads to further confusion. And the verbs for "to federate" and "to defederate" are also just... awkward and really just translate to "connect" and "stop connection" or something. It's not great.

Not that I have any alternatives to suggest honestly. And let's be real, even if I did, that ship has sailed, unless we can rally a big rebranding effort for the fediverse. Such a thing does not sound easy.

I like explaining it via analogy to email, since it's something even laypeople are familiar with. I mean email is federated in a sense as well, or at least it uses an open standard.

People are used to the idea that one email might be at domainone.com while another email is at domaintwo.com, but these emails can still talk to one another. Just imagine that, but instead of email, it's social media actions like posting, commenting, liking stuff and such. I feel like that gets the general idea across pretty well. It doesn't explain a lot of the edge cases though.