Trying to pitch the Fediverse on its technology backend to non-technical people is a bad approach, but so is trying to pitch it in terms of digital detox or "better" culture.
The backend is for the tech people, and the rest is your regular messy people. There are as many good pockets of the Fediverse as bad, because that's the internet.
In light of that, it's questionable to what extent the Fediverse should be pitched as a distinct thing in a similar vein as those platforms some Fediverse software emulates. Fediverse, open social web, whatever you want to call it is of main relevance more to those working on it and trying to promote it among developers.
To those of us using these platforms, it's probably better to simply invite those to our respective instances/sites as simply another site/app without all the jargon and background.
Forget Lemmy/Mastodon/Pixelfed/etc. except insofar as it's in the URL or needed to search apps. Ultimately they're backends, and many weren't going around inviting people to their sites or enthusiast forums talking up apache or phpbb or the like.
The Fediverse is an emerging subset of the open web with improved interconnectedness, and so what's more important than it is reinvigorating the spirit of the open web by reminding people there's more beyond the closed web by inviting and encouraging them to visit our open spaces alongside their own. It's closed web/walled garden thinking to discourage visiting a variety of sites and using a variety of apps.
The open web thrives, enduring, enveloping and eroding the enclosures despite their efforts to ward off its persistent being.
TL;DR:
Invite people to these spaces without the technobabble, don't give them shit for visiting/using enclosed sites/apps.
Celebrate the open web by showing them more places online to check out alongside theirs.
I think this is good advice, but has some caveats. If you skip the technobabble and politics about free (as in freedom), what's left? If it's just a platform that feels more complicated to sign up, because you have to learn about instances and it's not clear which one you want, plus your friends aren't there, plus it's just 45k users total instead of a lot...?
I mean we then need some positive thing. For all I care, we might call it detox. But what's the detox? We'd need something like a substancially better (healthier/more welcoming) culture, less posts that make up for that with quality... And I'm not 100% sure we're there... Feel free to disagree or comment on my perspective... I mean the atmosphere here is nicer than on Reddit. But not radically different, in my opinion.
I usually just describe fediverse platforms as being community built and run, rather than corporate platforms owned by a company. And then if folks have questions I can answer whatever they wanna know more about ๐คทโโ๏ธ
To me that feels like the best balance I've come up with so far, but maybe there are better approaches out there still :)
Fediverse: a network of community built and run platforms.
I like that.