How would you explain Lemmy/Kbin to a Reddit person or to a social media person?

Like Reddit, KBin and Lemmy are 'link aggregators'
This means, in subject driven Communities (sub-reddits), people post links or images or their thoughts and others comment on them
Reddit is software that's installed in one central location (server). This means it is owned and controlled by one single commercial entity.
Kbin and Lemmy are both software that are installed in multiple locations (servers), owned and controlled by multiple people and can be installed by anyone. This means no one can ever own or control the entirety of Lemmy.
Reddit, KBin and Lemmy can be accessed by users via websites or apps.
Reddit is centralised. If it disappeared tomorrow, it would be completely gone.
KBin and Lemmy are federated. If one instance (server) disappeared tomorrow, all the others would be unaffected and carry on as normal.
All instances of KBin and Lemmy can talk to all other instances of KBin and Lemmy, as long as they are federated.
Rule breaking and/or toxic instances/servers can be defederated by other servers/instances.
Reddit, KBin and Lemmy are all free to use. However, with Reddit you must contend with invasive privacy and advertising. The way to support KBin and Lemmy is to donate to the development team and the server/instance your account is on.

I just start with “It’s basically just a community owned Reddit” and leave it at that.
I think that gets the important point across. Getting into details about federation and picking servers just makes it sound complicated, when it really isn’t.
Then if someone’s interested I just recommend them a larger server and let them go from there.
I think people way over complicate things from the start and turn people off before they even try it.
- Yeah keep it simple is IMO a good thing.
  Like not saying it's like email servers or something, I got that and I know Reddit and how email servers works and it just muddied the waters for me.
  What do you think about this? It's like Reddit but everyone can make theirs if they want to.

It's like multiple reddit sites, but they all work the same and the content and users are synced between them. So you can pick any one of them, follow topics and contact users from all of them, and if one site goes haywire we just ignore or block it and move on.
- The way that I explain it is quite similar to yours. It works, but you need to emphasise
  that unlike in Reddit, there's no central group of admins controlling the whole thing; and
  that each instance has its own communities, and those are equivalent to subreddits.
  otherwise users start associating instances with subreddits.
  
  That’s how I explain it as well. It’s better than the email analogy I see all the time. Obviously using reddit as an example only works if the person you’re talking to knows what reddit is. Otherwise, I just change it to something they know (i.e. facebook, discord, etc.)

It's groupchat for social media apps.
If you've got just one app you use, and the admins go all Elon on the place, you either put up with it or you're out in the cold.
If you have a hundred different apps - you don't have that problem, but it's a fragmented mess you can't possibly keep track of.
But the fediverse gives you the best of both worlds. It's hundreds of apps, but they each pull in the feed of all the others - and if the admins of any one app turn out to be evil clowns, the other apps can quietly snip them out of the feed, just like making a new groupchat with everyone but Karen in it.
It's slowly coalescing into a handful of major cliques defined by the kinds of people they don't want to talk to.

Consider your specific audience you are reaching out to.
Honestly the biggest barrier for entry into the Lemmy content isn't choosing an instance. You can easily tell someone to sign up for Lemmy.world or kbin.social without going into detail about what that means.
The issue is that most social media users don't want to spend an hour or two searching for communities and blocking bots. They want a feed that is appealing at first, that they can tweak incrementally as they get more familiar with the service and its content.
With that in mind, what people want is to know what makes the experience helpful to them right now. I think that boils down to two primary concepts: Draw people in to specific communities that are more accessible than their Reddit counterparts, or convince them why Reddit is not a good experience for them
The latter is a tough sell to someone who already is happy with the Reddit experience. And the trouble with the former is there's currently not a great deal of communities that are clearly better than on Reddit. The few that I would say count are fairly niche interests.
I think the Lemmy and kbin software needs a set of default subscriptions for guests and new users. Something curated by instance admins to provide the best new user experience, while still allowing them to customize it from there.
For what it's worth, I would expect most social media users not to care about any of the decentralization aspects. Putting too much focus on the "it's like email" thing is likely to fall on deaf ears at first.

I just told my friends that the federation is like the states in a country. They exist independently, abide by similar, but specific rules and allow you to travel between each other without friction.
- is like european union traveling feature
  
  Bruh that's even better 😁

Hey, this may help
https://unofficial-kbin-guide.surge.sh/
- Cool

In layman's terms, comparing it to email seems the easiest way to explain.
"It's like a distributed Reddit with a bunch of instances that are run by different people, and they all talk to one another. Some people have an email address with gmail.com, some have yahoo.com, some have protonmail.com, etc, but they can all email one another. Lemmy instances share each others' posts in a similar way."
- This is also how I explain it... It's crazy how all these centralized services have made something as old and simple as email seem foreign to people. I'll explain it this way, and still get something like, "but this is a website". To which I say "so is gmail.com"

To a Redditor: Basically Reddit
To a social media user: Like other platforms except there's no following and no one looks at who's posting the content
- At least here in kbin I can push a button that sets a user to be followed.
- Still a bit sad I can't follow peeps on here. Have to do this on mastodon
  
  You can subscribe to a lemmy user's rss feed (I know it's not the same, but close)

Don't even mention the fediverse, unless they pry. It's another thing to explain.
If they get Reddit just say it's like a bunch of mini Reddits connected to each other.

"it's like 50 intertwined tiny reddits from before reddit enshitified"
- And unlike previous attempts at Reddit clones, it's not entirely made of far right extremists. It's full of far left extremists.
  
  Finally!

It's a federated reddit alternative. The most I've ever had to elaborate is to clarify that "federated" basically means "decentralized." I've never tried to explain it to someone who can't figure it out from that.
- The federated part is what confused me the most when I was looking into making the switch.
  The ideology behind it is simple, but the term "federated" made it sound like some government thing.
  
  federations are decentralized

more toxic than reddit these days and that's saying something.
frankly I'm tired of even mundane, apolitical comments resulting in angry rage filled replies. not as nice a place it used to be
- Peculiar.
  I don't see this behavior.
  Are you referring to a news or a politic community?
  
  almost any community really if it's on world. I prefer stick to my home instance

in under 10 words
Reddit like email social media
did it in under 6 word's
livakivi

It's like Reddit was before they started trying to monetize it and screw over the better apps. It's probably impossible for it to get screwed up like Reddit did. Fewer users, though, for better or for worse.

Just like how people can use different browsers to get to content on the internet, people can use different websites to get to the fediverse.

I just tell them there are pirate subs (comms), that get's their attention rather quickly.
- Piracy and porn... The secret to every social networks success...
- Lol! The best way

Activity pub and the feddiverse are literally the email of social media. Everyone uses email and has a basic grip on it. You at gmail.com can mail someone at hotmail.com and vice versa. So the host you choose doesn't really matter much.
Mastodon and other similar clients give you a classic twitter like experience. With linear feeds and no algorithms to manipulate what you see. What you want to see is what you will see.
Lemmy and other similar clients give you a reddit like interface. Again with no complex manipulative algorithms. And the ability for much better moderated and curated experience than reddit.
Peertube gives you a YouTube like interface and focuses on video content.
Pixelfed is a Google photos or similar interface focusing on images.
They're all activity pub. And can even interoperate. You can post to Lemmy from mastodon etc. Though that's a bit more advanced currently.

does using an analogy about an unrelated topic work
- What do you mean?
  
  https://ibb.co/bjt07Tw