[monkeywork]

>My step mom is in her 60s, a prolific reader, member of two book clubs and most of her friends are readers. She would never think about joining Bookwyrm because the value prop makes no sense to her.

A free site to discuss books with others doesn't make sense to her? The first line on their website says "BookWyrm is a social network for tracking your reading, talking about books, writing reviews, and discovering what to read next." Sounds like that might be your step mom's jam.

>Why does anyone care about federated? (I’m talking normal people here.) Mastodon, Pleroma? What are those? Who cares? Why? (Again, talking as normal people here, the kind of people you’d talk to waiting in line for a Southwest Airlines flight to Orlando.)

I agree why would she care about any of those things - she's just signing up to a site to talk about books. You're the one focusing on those things not her. I honestly struggle to follow these complaints from tech-oriented folks on tech-oriented websites tying to say that some phantom person who isn't tech oriented will just be deeply lost.

You talk about products based on the audience - here on Hacker News it makes sense to talk about the fact that this is federated and activitypub based, at your step moms book club you'd just talk about the fact that it's a social site for books.

[jsnell]

Actually, even before that line they have a much more prominent subtitle: "Social Reading and Reviewing, Decentralized".

So it does seem that the federated nature is what they consider their main unique selling point for everyone, it's not just a framing for the HN audience.

[sanderjd]

Yeah this would make sense, sort of like how posts here include what programming language some product is written in, because we're interested in that sort of thing, even though it isn't part of the general messaging of the product.

But in this case "decentralized" and "anti-corporate" are prominent in the messaging. "Decentralized" shows up twice above the fold, and both things get their own icon, also above the fold.

I'd really love federation / de-centralization to be an implementation detail of useful products, where someone posts here, "Hey, you know this awesome new product that's getting lots of traction? Here's a blog post about how they implemented it using ActivityPub because it allowed them to launch and get network effects way faster!". But that never seems to be what I see. Instead it always seems to be, "Hey check this new product out, the selling point is that it's decentralized!".