I've been wondering if the AOL walled garden works as a metaphor for the non-fediverse Internet.

For my friends old enough to remember pre-Internet AOL, I have described the difficulties getting your mind around fediverse concepts as similar to the paradigm shift we all went through when first wandering out from AOL onto the open World Wide Web (ie, HTTP websites).

What do you mean, there's more than one area to talk about the latest episode of Friends?! Isn't that confusing? How do you know where to go for that content?

In AOL, I can just enter a keword. What's this about a search engine? Why do I need to use some unrelated website, like Hotbot, to find out where people are talking about Friends?

For a couple of my friends, this analogy has sparked their openness to digging in a little and learning about Lemmy, etc, and it's made then more forgiving of the fact that certain aspects are not intuitive right off the bat.