I have a very sloppy exclude-the-middle overly-simplifed way of explaining Fedi. I ususally say:
“A lot people connected their servers together to create this one big social network that no one company owns. The biggest server is called Mastodon.”
If I have time I’ll mention that there’s a lot of toxicity on there and I’ll get into how moderation works.
The technical detail I gloss over is that Mastodon is a hosted server-side application and that there are many Mastodon servers.
The mental model people walk away with from this convo seems to be good enough to follow along with what Fedi is 🤷🏻♀️