I don’t think many people understand that if they use Lemmy or kbin, they are posting to the fediverse. There are other platforms and will be more to come. Referring to a post on “Lemmy” or “kbin” is like saying you saw a post on your Windows or Mac computer.
We should be referring to it as…
- I saw it on the fediverse.
- Hey fediverse users …
- A thread on the fediverse…
New terms may emerge but referring to the platform seems weird, almost ignorant.
edit: A better example is email. You wouldn’t assume everyone is on Hotmail because that is the email provider you use. You say I’m sendingan eamail, not I’m sending a Hotmail.
🤓🤓🤓 just use whatever
I’m not referencing the fediverse, it’s stupid. But also, lemmy isn’t a great name so I probably just won’t mention anything like that.
“The Fediverse is stupid.”
“The Fediverse is stupid.”
Negativeland said Christianity is stupid.
Christianity is stupid.
Communism is good!
[then a lot of chanting and noisemaking]
If I see a post on Lemmy World, then it’s from Lemmy World.
Now that gets me thinking, what the hell was Wally World anyways? Was that a Chevy Chase thing?
While you’re correct, it’s just a clunky term. I think some other way to refer to the whole thing will probably come along soon, and in a few years, people will regard saying fediverse the same way we look back on people talking about “surfing the information superhighway” or whatever.
Dang I totally forgot all about that term. Been awhile. Well it eventually reduced to “surfing the net”.
The thing about the internet, is it was the thing to make it only one net. Previously there were weird systems like bitnet, VMSnet, where you had to juggle email address encoding standards to get balkanized college campus networks to talk back and forth to each other.
“The web” became the subset of the net, that worked with web browsers. Only one thing.
Was there a “The Facebook” period? Or was that just a movie name?
So then we passed through a period of brands. Reddit is a brand. It is not altogether surprising that people would refer to the fediverse in terms of brands. Lemmy, kbin, beehaw, whatever.
Email and the web had/have specific protocols associated with them. The fediverse has multiple protocols. We’re using ActivityPub, which seems to have won as a standard. It isn’t exactly catchy or smooth flowing off the tongue.
Ok, if we try to brain crunch all these previous trends, here’s what it’s going to be called, if it hasn’t been already:
THE VERSE
The difference between the fediverse and the universe will be forgotten. Linguistically, people will not keep up with that detail. Only old timers / early adopters will notice that linguistic change.
Possibly, ‘verse’ will come to be seen as short for multiverse.
I think it’s more like saying, “I saw this on my phone,” or, “I was on the computer and read,” which are both entirely reasonable.
It’s just stating what format you were using when you saw it. Like, “I was scrolling through Google News and read…” What you actually read was an article hosted on a different website, but you were using the platform of Google News to read it. It’s the same kind of thing as saying, “I read on Lemmy,” because you were browsing Lemmy when you read something.
It’s not wrong to say that these things are on this site. I often specify Lemmy.World because that’s the instance that I use and other Fediverse sites function slightly differently. That’s one of the both great and annoying things about the Fediverse is how every instance is slightly different. I’ll say, “I was on Lemmy.World and…” I don’t know, saw a post, made a post, had trouble because mod controls are minimal over here, whatever. Saying, “On the Fediverse,” is more generic. It’s usually considered best convention to go with more SPECIFIC terms than generic. I consider using my Mastadon account and using my Lemmy account to be different, but they’re both on the Fediverse. I would feel really weird talking about my Mastadon account in the same terms as my Lemmy.World one since I use the two platforms completely differently.
But you are posting on a Kbin thread right now, not a Lemmy thread. So you’re not “on Lemmy World” when you’re viewing this thread.
No. I am on Lemmy.World right now viewing a KBin thread. My entire interaction here is through Lemmy.World and not KBin. So for me to say, “I was on KBin arguing with someone,” would be factually incorrect because I am not on KBin. It would be factually correct to say, “I was on the Fediverse arguing with someone,” but since the Fediverse has different forms, that interaction itself could take several forms and context does sometimes matter. There’s nothing wrong with the more generic The Fediverse, but there’s also nothing wrong with stating which instance you’re using to be more specific.
You had an argument on the 'verse.
The apostrophe is gonna get dropped eventually. Same as it did for 'net meaning internet.
I doubt fedi~ will be remembered after awhile. It’ll be seen as pedantic, technical, or old school.
I don’t know if people are generally sci-fi enough to think of you as on “planet Lemmy” but it would have a bit of snark like saying you’re on planet Mars. Could be a good subculture lingo.
“I am Clark Kent from the planet Kbin!”
“Yeah and I’m Flash Gordon STFU.”
But the person you were arguing with wasn’t arguing with you on Lemmy.world, so that’s misleading on where the argument was taking place.
If someone took you at your word and looked on Lemmy.world in specific, they would not be able to find the argument in question, because it was taking place in a Kbin.social thread.
The battlecruisers were out arguing in neutral space, in the verse.
The cruisers’ home ports were planet Lemmy and planet Kbin.
Unfortunately half the galaxy was destroyed in the ensuing exchange.
You’re missing the point. If I email you, are we talking ON Gmail? ON Hotmail? Not really. We’re using our different clients to interact with the same original message. Sure, the message gets converted to your emails specific formatting, but it’s just a copy of the original info. The message itself is the conversation, the clients are just access to it.
You wouldn’t say “I drove my Honda to the store”. You’d say “I drove my car”.
Nobody said “I’m browsing Apollo/Sync/RIF”. You’d say “I’m browsing Reddit” or “fuck spez”.
You’re one step from being the mom that calls every video game system a “Nintendo”.
are we talking ON Gmail?
Sometimes. People meeting in real life, exchanging email addresses, and noticing they’re both on GMail, is common enough for some people, they really are on GMail. Implying they could chat trivially. But that’s not applicable to the scenario under discussion.
Actually you’d just say you drove to the store. We don’t really care if you own a car, a truck, and a SUV in your driveway. We don’t expect you to have a horse and buggy.
it’s more correct to say they’re on lemmy than kbin though… they are interacting through lemmy: kbin is literally irrelevant to them
… and that’s kinda the point of the fediverse isn’t it? you shouldn’t care where something is stored, and if you don’t care where it’s stored then you have only 1 way to refer to the space: the client by which you’re viewing it
people referring to it as “lemmy” or “kbin” or “mastodon” is the fediverse working as intended, and that’s good news!
(it’s also much better marketing for us! people search fediverse and they get a bunch of random descriptions about what it is… people search lemmy/kbin and at least they have a join button)
Mastodon is at least something of a more generalized term at least, because that’s referring to hundreds of instances. And it has a specific (Twitter-esque) format that unites them. But Lemmy and Kbin has the same formatting structure (Reddit-esque). Makes me wonder if we need a specific, but generalized term that unites everything in this format.
In Usenet days we called them newsreaders.
“fediverse” isn’t correct either - it’s too broad. Kbin and Lemmy post to a part of the fediverse - the “threadiverse”. Meanwhile job in can also post to the microblogverse connecting with Mastodon. And there is not one fediverse - ir is both separated by different algorithms for different bits and also within areas some bits federate with others.
If you want a good term for the threadiverse, then Feddit seems like a good catch all name?
Y’all talkin’ on the verse.
I personally like to call it “Fedi”. I was reading a post / thread on Fedi and it said…
If someone asked where exactly it was I would mention the platform.
And in my opinion, everyone should be mentioning the name of the platform they are on. Because when you mention what software or server you used, it promotes it to non Fediverse people. And it also tells current Fediverse users about other Fedi platforms that they may like, and didn’t know about.
That’s how I found Misskey, and it’s quite cool.
So many options to explore, and try out interfaces that may work better for you.We are all on the Fediverse, we all should be promoting that in any way we can.
Share, educate and take pride in our diverse community.What if I want to call it Freddy?
I just consistently mention it because it’s a huge topic atm and it’s to everyone’s benefit to clarify. If I’m over here talking about how I’m SO glad I can mute instances willy-nilly as I please but don’t mention I’m doing that from kbin, that’s going to send a lot of frustrated lemmings scrambling through their settings.
Generic is “(the) fedi/fediverse.” But where I’m specifically from may carry connotations in UI or culture for those here, and those not here would maybe prefer a platform name they can actually look up, as has already happened to me once.
I do think the “Blaaah, we got X amount of users and we’re the biggest in the fedi!” posts are borderline odd, because yeah, we’re not going head to head anymore. The tribalism we’ve had drilled into us for decades, we have no need of now and I don’t wanna see any of the platform politics that’s always been in the past. Thankfully, it seems to be stemming from genuine enjoyment instead of elitist gloating, and it keeps itself to a minimum.
Yeah, the tribalism needs to go away and we need to think more along the lines of the “neighborhood” we are in. All the Fedis are our neighbors.
I dunno, the Ferengis are neighbors and they’re damn greedy.
The Centauris I hear are pretty nice.
Why not “lemmyverse” for lemmy federation?
I think just Lemmy, kbin, mastodon, etc. naturally implies the platform-specific -verse, doesn’t it? I think “Hey, Lemmy–” posts addressing the entire fediverse are being accidentally myopic, but “Hey, Lemmy [users]” would be understandable, given a need to discuss our UI differences. The former is fairly common atm, though, which I admit is faintly annoying to see on my kbin feed. I feel so left out.
“Hey, Soviet SSR! In Russia you don’t federate. Federation does you!”
Didn’t mean to be so accurate…
I like the name fediverse, but I think it’s too broad. I think we need a collective name for platforms like Lemmy and KBin (which are more like each other than they are like Mastodon).
“forum”. It’s correct. Short for web forum. Social media forum if you really want to get picky.
No, “forums” are old style message boards from back when the internet was good, that people stopped using for some reason. If KBin/Lemmy can one day be half as good as real forums I’d consider that to be a success.
What feature is missing from KBin or Lemmy to make them forums? KBin superficially looks like a forum, but I only just got here. My next step is to find out whether Lemmy devs are tenable people to work with on forum software development. They are Marxist-Leninists and run a M-L instance or two, it seems. I’m a socialist but not M-L and I’ve got run out of plenty of “tankie” subs on Reddit, so I’m worried about that. I don’t enjoy being called liberal or a bootlicker.
I was being slightly tongue-in-cheek with my nostalgia there, with some truth to it as well, but if anything it’s something intangible. KBin and Lemmy haven’t developed a culture yet, in my opinion a lot of damage has been done to online culture by the big centralised social media networks, and it remains to be seen if something good emerges here or whether the toxicity of modern social media creeps back in.
I personally wouldn’t worry about the political beliefs of the Lemmy developers, it’s open source software, anyone can use it and run an instance. Each instance sets its own content and moderation policies and decides who it federates with. There are over 1000 instances. The developers have made it clear that they don’t want their instance to be seen as the default one and discouraged people from registering there during the influx from Reddit.
My own personal interest was beyond running a server. It was getting features / policies into the software. I’m actually starting to think that developer’s politics aren’t the real issue. Might be open source dynamics are the real issue. Saw a lot of things in the bug tracker of someone saying, “Oh yeah that’s a good idea” and I thought whatever feature it was, might pull people into more chaos in various ways. Chaos meaning, people don’t stick with communities they want to continue to be in. It may be an inherent problem with writing software that uses the Fediverse. People may have rather different ideas about what the Fediverse is “for”. Like I’m not trying to look at thousands of GIFs a day. I think that’s what’s basically wrong with social media. Big groups, big volumes of shallow posts, that mainly works towards advertizing business models and reducing the “user’s” participation mainly to the act of “watching the new TV”.
The nickname I’ve seen used for kbin and lemmy is the “threadiverse,” which I personally like.
Much too problematic with Meta’s new platform.
Calling it “Threadiverse” is walking right into Meta’s playbook. Zuckerberg would want you to call it exactly that.
You could go all The Orville and call it the Zipperverse.
I’m a bit creeped out by her saying it over and over again. It’s like she got her time dialer too soon.
Allow people to enjoy their experience here. When you start going down this path, you are confusing the user base that’s still learning a whole new platform. When I first got here, I said a lot of the same stuff, that I was a Lemmy world member, etc.
That sounds a lot like Pier 1 Imports!
Are you implying that defederation is a myth? Since the flow of data between instances is conditional on the instances. they are relevant.
Well Kermit the Frog said it’s a myth. But every time he said it, a miss showed up.
You’re vastly overestimating the knowledge, intelligence and fucks given by the vast majority of people.
The fediverse is frankly too complex and convoluted for the normies. Whichever instance manages to remove the complexity, solve the onboarding process and get the content right will win out and be the thing the normies speak of.
Call it Verse. You’ll win the branding wars.
Referring to a post on “Lemmy” or “kbin” is like saying you saw a post on your Windows or Mac computer.
That’s not how language works. Language evolves naturally and in this scenario people would instantly know that the user had seen something on a fediverse platform without having to use another awful ‘-verse’ word.
Likewise you can’t police how people use language. People use whatever makes understanding for both sides easiest on both sides
If someone logs into a website called Kbin and sees something interesting, it’s fair to say ‘I saw something interesting on Kbin’ without having to give unnecessary explanations about what the fediverse is.
And once again, no one likes the word fediverse…
without having to use another awful ‘-verse’ word.
They will stop using prefixes. They will just say verse.
based antiprescriptivism
Tell my old English teacher you can’t police the way people use language…
And you can’t language the way people use police either!
Dude, fediverse is the whole system linking everything together and lemmy/kbin/mastodon is the platform within it. So refer it as fediverse IS saying you saw a post from the internet.
I wonder how much sleep early network people lost about communicating through the ether. Or late 19th century physicists for that matter.
