I think it's generally a bad move trying to explain the technology first, it's how people tried to advertise Mastodon when the Tumblr exodus happened and I bounced straight off it. I looked at the list of instances and they were all stuff like "a Mastodon instance for sci-fi nerds" and I couldn't get over the inertia of tying myself to that designated interest.

What we need to do is get people to create accounts and experience the fediverse and then we can point them at examples of the tech if they want to know more, stuff like "that person you replied to is on a different instance and you're able to speak to each other because of ~federation~".