this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2023
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Very difficult to discuss with the fiance without know the terminology yet lol

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Petition to name them SubLemmys

[–] [email protected] 38 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I like communities, honestly, it sounds much less... y'know, reddity?

And also, it's much more intuitive.

[–] bnaur 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Personally that term makes me a bit uneasy. To me it sounds too grandiose and organized just for something that might just be some random people shitposting or chatting about their interests. And actually having tight knit communities can easily lead to all kinds of negative effects, group think, hierarchies and drama.

Of course some subreddits, forums, lemmy communities etc can be actual communities but just as a personal preference I don't like the idea of calling them that default.

[–] BigUwU 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don’t like the term community because it’s difficult to understand the hierarchy. Is an instance a part of a community? Or vice versa?

What do you think of subinstance?

[–] bnaur 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

To me subinstance sounds more like a technical term, but I guess people would just call them subs anyway. I think that's a problem in general with deriving anything from "instance".

I guess community does a good job at being a more human centric term. You have the technical side of things, servers and software (instances) and on those you have the actual user facing parts (communities) so in that way it's kinda fitting.

Further overthinking about the terminology I just realised that Lemmy calls joining communities "subscribing" and Reddit calls it "joining", while I would naturally think it would be more fitting the other way around. Naming things is hard.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I think "sub" is what people are going to call them reguardless. It is just internet language at this point, a subdivision of a community (by community I mean lemmy as a whole) is called a sub. Weather it's a subreddit or sublemmy. I'm not saying bring reddit with us, I am just saying the internet can take the term "sub" with it and use it elsewhere.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Sublemminals? (or Sublemmynals)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Instances also need better names.

[–] MasterBlaster 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Why not "servers"? That's all they are. They serve content.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Because technically, one server can host multiple instances. Instances are containerized— literally an instance of lemmy.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Is there any practical reason to actually do that, though?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What would you call gmail vs hotmail?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

But that's a provider/customer relationship, on the fediverse it isn't.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Agree on a technical level, but in terms of the average netizen being able to visualize the relationship, "providers" makes it much easier

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I don't think we should try to visualize something that's not there just because it's (supposedly) easier for the average netizen.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

For now. Commercial servers are possible, especially if communities become multi-instance in the future.

Every mature decentralized service calls them providers. Phone providers, ISPs, email providers, etc. I guess usenet just calls them "news servers", though.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It's provider/consumer (not customer, something being a "provider" doesn't necessarily mean they are selling stuff).

We are consumers, we consume the content that the instances provide, as content providers.