or maybe some other terminology would be better? lots of people get confused when you ask them to choose an instance, sometimes I think even the word “proxy”, “host”, or “hub” is simpler
the specific terms aren’t my point, just a discussion to see if we can come up with a better name
Personally, I’ve been using the words “site” or “website”, because I think highlighting the fact that each instance is its own independent website clarifies the issue to a large degree.
But you’re 100% right. It just doesn’t alleviate the sense of overwhelm people feel. And I don’t know that anything really will, except for repeated and continued exposure, because networks of quasi-independent actors are complicated things, and the world is now full of people who have experienced the internet as little more than 5 insulated websites. The mental model that people have for social media is just “everyone’s reliably using the same website as me”. The idea that different social media websites are communicating with each other, and also that those social media websites don’t have a billion accounts – and don’t need a billion accounts in order to be viable – is just… alien. To the point where even those of us who are engaging in the experiment kind of sweep the essence of the space under the rug, you know? Everyone treats “Mastodon” as a singular location. This here is “Lemmy”. “kbin” is over there, at a particular URL. If we treated the rest of the internet with this level of abstraction, I’d have to tell you that I was “On Firefox” right now, or telling my wife about this meme I saw “On macOS”, or “at my desk”.
And like, sure, some of us have a deeper internal understanding of federated social media. We heavily used IRC in the past, or get grok how email works, or whatever, but the fact that we still all kind of collectively brush aside the heterogeneous and quasi-independent nature of the network when actually using it in practice I think speaks to just how heady it all really is. And I’m not sure there’s a linguistic solution to it. It’s just an incredibly messy space in a world where people crave simplicity.