Growing up with email, forums, and IRC, it seems only natural...

Well yea, of course, if you grew up with decentralized social technology, then it seems natural to you. If you're reading this, you're probably in the top 1% of tech-literate people in the world (if not top 0.1%). Unfortunately, if you are reading this, you'll probably also have a hard time understanding the struggle of the remaining 99%, because you will have a hard time putting yourself in their shoes.

Reacting with astonishment about how people are not as tech-literate as you would hope is not a good path for understanding those people.

This is essentially the Curse of Knowledge. For good examples, look at some of the tag lines that appear on some fediverse app websites:

• Lemmy: "A link aggregator for the fediverse"
• Misskey: "Interplanetary microblogging platform.Misskey is an open source, decentralized social media platform that's free forever!"
• Mbin: "A federated content aggregator, voting, discussion and microblogging platform."

Normal people (the 99%) do not know any of these words:

• Link/content aggregator?
• "Fediverse"?
• Microblogging?
• Open source?
• Decentralized?
• Federated?

(I'm not especially bashing Lemmy, Misskey or Mbin here, it was just some examples I found; no offense meant, this is a hard problem, lots of fediverse apps do this)

It's no surprise that the fediverse is mostly dominated by technical people, because generally the fediverse platforms do not do an amazing job at introducing and teaching people the concept of the fediverse. You will not get a "normal person" (non-techie person) to sign up on a site that starts out with several technical terms that they don't understand.

The approach taken by Mastodon's intro site is much more friendly to newcomers and I wish more apps would do the same. Pixelfed is also close though it still mentions "Open source and decentralized".

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.

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.