For now, i don’t know how to explain it and make it comprehensible to tech illiterate, let alone incite them to give a try for longer than the very short term.
If you are yourself a tech illiterate, which method worked for you?
If the tech illiterate is someone you know, which method was successful to convince them?
I’ve found that most people understand that signing up for an email service like Gmail allows them to communicate with people who aren’t on Gmail. Tie that in to explaining federation.
“Mastodon is kind of the same idea, but for social media.”
Obviously the technical details are different, but it helps explain federation at a very high level. Then you can talk about why that’s valuable for longevity of a system.
Example: the decline of Yahoo and AOL as email providers didn’t end email as a technology because email doesn’t depend on those companies existing to function.