Ah. Thanks for the target audience explanation.

What I mean with Mastodon is that, immediately after “Social networking that’s not for sale”, you see more sentences: “Your home feed should be filled with what matters to you most, not what a corporation thinks you should see. Radically different social media, back in the hands of the people.”

I think the technical details, such as open source and federation are not going to click with people who don’t know those ideas. However, open source and federation can create something that, for those people, is valuable.

So the question is: what does Lemmy offer that clicks with people who don’t know technical details?

This is up for discussion, of course. But I’d argue there’s “freedom”, “choice”, “human (and not corporate) communities”, “made for people, not for profits”…

That leads me to my suggestion:

A discussion platform that is truly free. You choose your feed, not a corporation. You choose where to set up your account, not a corporation. You choose what communities to be a part of, not a corporation.

or

A discussion platform that is truly free. You choose your feed. You choose where to set up your account. You choose what communities to be a part of. You choose, not a corporation

The bolded text is like Mastodon’s first sentence. The rest of the text is like Mastodon’s other sentences.

The technical details can be explained later in the page, just like Mastodon does it.

I’d love to edit my previous post but I don’t wanna spam you.

As to target audiences, I think it could be helpful to specify the personas that we’re building the sentences for. Does the persona know what the Fediverse is? Do they know what enshittification is? Do they know what open source is? Do they have strong opinions about surveillance capitalism (even if they don’t know the word for it)? Or are they clueless regarding all of these topics?

My suggestion assumes some knowledge of these topics. To be clear, if I’d single out a suggestion of mine, it’d be:

A discussion platform that can’t enshittify. You choose your feed. You choose where to host your account.

The best sentence will depend on the target audience. Is there a way to know who would be that audience?

Also, responding more directly to your question, I’ve got a frame challenge: What about two or three short sentences, like what Mastodon does?

A platform that is truly democratic. You choose your feed. You choose where to host your account.

A platform where you’re truly free. You choose your feed. You choose where to host your account.

A platform that can’t enshittify. You choose your feed. You choose where to host your account.

That third one I like, because it’s a differentiator that Lemmy has in comparison with ButterflyX or whatever Jack the Twitter Guy is working on right now; Lemmy is not at risk of enshitifying, unlike ButterflyX.

Also, if it’s important to differentiate Lemmy from Mastodon or other Fediverse platforms, the sentences could start with “A discussion platform”.

Also, here’s a take where I tried to make no reference to electronics:

A bustling room filled with tables, each filled with people talking about what they find interesting, where the conversation topics are always chosen by the table and always changing, and where you’re free to set up your own tables with your own topics.

or, more succinctly,

A bustling room filled with tables, where each table is filled with people talking about what they find interesting, a room where you’re free to set up your own tables with your own topics.

Also, I just realized that every time that I edit this post you get notified becase I @ed you. Sorry!

And, finally, happy cake day, @nutomic@lemmy.ml!

That’s alright. I understand that explaining takes time and energy. That time and energy is something I often choose to spend, but I also sometimes choose not to. I would ask you why you want to stop explaining things, but that would, ironically, require you to explain things. I’m not saying this ironically or sarcastically: I hope you can be understood easily!

To understand what you mean, could you rephrase or explain your ideas? I read your post and couldn’t understand what you meant.

“Elections”, " representative", and “federal” could exclude many non-American and non-Canadian countries.

Edit: Oh, silly me. I misread. I thought you wanted to exclude American stuff, not “political” stuff. Well that’s another conversation. Is there something that is not political? Is there something that doesn’t comment on the distributions of political goods such as significance, relevance, resource allocations (including time and attention), or value judgments?