A thing, though: I'm not a huge fan of saying "intuittive/unintuitive" in general, because that implies a relationship to some numinous realm of implied knowledge people have or don't. Usually it's really about ingrown cultural expectations; things are "resonant" or not with those expectations, and there's a tension in design between conforming to them and seeking to change them.
The unintuitiveness of federation as a concept seem tied to a long time of being accustomed, as users of the internet, to monolithic and centralized services. "We need to find a better way to make this relatable" makes sense to me. "We need to mask/change the nature of this thing because it's incomprehensible to stereotypical average users" doesn't.
@creatrixtiara I think it's a little bit of column A and a little bit of column B. People aren't used any more to thinking of internet services as decentralized (other than email, which is almost vestigial at this point), but also the way it gets explained seems pretty suboptimal, and the terminology is downright bad (why "instances" and not just "servers"? why use "federation" in a way that maps so poorly to the real world?)
@brunodias
The internet of today is so much different from the Internet I grew up with. Back then we were using the internet, we were using mIRC or BitchX to get to the IRC server we wanted to be on (anyone remembers netsplits) we were using websites, we were using whatever helped us doing what we wanted.
Nowadays there is websites and services engineered and A/B tested to the latest bit.
Whenever I happen to use facebook it feels like it is using me instead.
@brunodias it is odd to me that it seems unintuitive. maybe bein and old timer on the internet helps with some of that.
i mean email, listservs, and especially usenet were all decentralized
@brunodias I've just been explaining it as being similar to how email accounts can be on different hosts. It's that but for microblogging instead of emails.
@ian yeah that's the analogy I've used most too
@brunodias I don't think it's necessarily the concept that's unintuitive - it's just being obfuscated unnecessarily. The way it's being described right now is its own masking.