Sometimes I struggle to convey what continues to fascinate me about dezentraly organized social media - its like explaining to someone who never played Go why its awesome who never played it.
And what I would usually recommend is (in the case of Go): watch hikaru no go (popular Go anime). I could teach them the rules, but to capture the spirit of it, I would also need to spend hours playing it with them. So instead, I give them an awesome series, which conveys the drama, fights, frustrations through story.
Would that also work for the fediverse? Sometimes I tend to get lost in technical details and how it tries to solve problems about moderation without conveing any of the daily drama and excitement I have - so what would be a good series/film/anime/book/comic that could convey this? Or do we need to create it?
Imagine a bunch of separate web forums each with their own management and policies. We have all used those. Now imagine that they are loosely connected to each other behind the scenes, so you can cross-post between them, if the admins are willing. That’s not too hard to understand, imho.
There is occasional minor drama when there are cultural differences between two forums (say a leftwing vs a rightwing political forum) and the admins get upset and start interfering with the backend connectivity (defederating other instances) because they don’t like what members of the other forum are saying. That drama is not an attractive feature of the fediverse, but rather the opposite. Anyway, I hope that helps.