I don't see it as a question of understanding as much as caring. It's not very realistic to do a "here's technical details of the protocol we'll be using" talk every time you invite someone.
They probably don’t care that much in the case of email either. Would it be better to explain it by analogy? “This is like email, you pick a provider and you can talk to anyone from there.”
Okay, I can agree with your framing from the sibling:
> I’m not convinced that open/federated protocols are inherently more difficult for people in general to understand.
We may be disagreeing on the hierarchy of the goals. I think the priorities here are:
1. That the protocol is open and decentralized from the operator perspective (which is ensured in the case of Matrix).
2. That many people use it.
The #1 should be important for an opinionated minority pushing everyone else. The good thing is, non-technical people usually don't have much brand loyalty in these things. It's purely perceived convenience.
That the majority of people understand and care about #1 may or may not be realistic. I see it as partially another cause. Today, we have much of de facto centralization in email while the protocol is still decentralized. It would be nice to push chat to a more or less similar state and work from there. (I would also gladly see decentralization and inter-operation of many things enforced by law, but this is even more pie in the sky.)
Still, certainly your analogy can be used in communicating with people. But the main thing I'm trying to achieve is #2, getting them on board anyway.
Yeah, I think we largely agree. I'm mostly aiming for #2, because I'm hoping that if we can get enough people using something that's hard to centralize, network effects will take care of #1.
Consider email for example: I think the main reason it's stuck around with us for so long is that we're at the point where being reachable by email is just expected. With everyone using email, someone trying to replace it with a centralized option would need to get everyone on board, while someone who wants to interoperate with email in general doesn't have that issue.
ISPs and phone companies are similar; nobody's going to start one that can't interoperate with the others nowadays. The public wouldn't stand for it, even if they couldn't explain why in terms of the underlying protocols.
While I would certainly love it if we could get people to care about open protocols, I think getting enough adoption of an open protocol would really be sufficient, so long as it's not easy for one big player to lock it down. (Google Talk for example; it was XMPP, but Google was the only player that mattered then as far as the public was concerned. Matrix is in a better position than that now.)
