this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2023
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Asklemmy
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Learned about Lemmy from Reddit but never heard of kbin until recently. That said, I like the name Lemmy a lot more than the name kbin. kbin sounds like a hex editor for KDE, not a Reddit alternative. I love the open source community, but sometimes the names of projects leave much to be desired. Lemmy isn't the perfect name but it's more memorable than kbin.
That's what I needed to hear today. genius
Anyone who doesn't get this joke is not going to care about the difference.
Speaking about names. What the hell is a "magazine"?? It's like the kbin devs went out of their way to ensure they named everything to be as confusing to outsiders as possible.
Kind of like how Lemmy made up communities? Lol you don’t call microblogs “toots” either. Seems every fediverse software has their own terminology.
Also it’s dev, singular. Kbin has been put together by only one dev. I personally find that damn impressive considering it’s functionally on par with Lemmy being only 2 months old to Lemmy’s 4 years.
Community is descriptive though, they're literally communities centered around some topic. Magazine only works in a much more abstract sense.
I think you can easily make arguments either way. Which is why it’s a moot point. For example, you could argue magazines make more sense because we’re consuming this media in written form, and it’s collected together by subject, like a magazine.
Community is fine too, it’s descriptive in the sense that it’s a literal to the purpose. It’s the same as calling the site itself “forum” or something like that.
Community seems like a fine name, did you want them to call it a subreddit? Lol
Nothing wrong with community, the point is Lemmy created the term the same as Kbin created magazine. Not every microblogging site in the fediverse calls them “toots” for example.
Yeah but community does a good job of explaining what it is conceptually with a word everyone understands, while being "vendor neutral" as it were.
"magazine" tells me fuck all, I'm not even certain what it's supposed to be.
Right? I also don't fully understand what Microblogs are on kbin?
Microblogs are like posts on Mastodon. They’re “toots”. Kbin federates with thread-based fediverse instances and microblog based ones like Mastodon. (I don’t think Lemmy does this?)
Kbin calling them microblogs is actually basically the equivalent of Lemmy’s term communities in the sense that their both literal descriptions.
I see! Thanks!
Holy shit it all makes sense now! I’ve been seeing posts and comments randomly talking about magazines for ages now with absolutely no idea what any of them are going on about. Didn’t realise it was a Kbin thing. That’s one of the downsides of Federation I suppose, sometimes shit just gets weird.
I literally chose Lemmy instead of kbin because kbin sounds like a KDE app.
If it was a kde app I'd be more likely to join
It kinda does I suppose!
Also, Lemmy is pronounceable, like Jimmy or any other name. How many syllables is kbin? Four individual letters?
Also also, "Lemmy World" can be said out loud in polite company. Shit just doesn't work.
It would be pronounced “kaybin”. Like the Linux directory /sbin. It’s basically a name technical people would appreciate in a pun sort of way.
Okay, thank you. "Kaybin" is pronounceable - when you know this.
I am not very familiar with Linux. Can you tell me what /sbin means? And if kbin is a nod to that, then what does the "k" mean?
Superuser BINaries
Really? Kbin as the name is what intrigued me initially over Lemmy. It’s actually inspired by Linux, the sbin directory to be specific.