Technology
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
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1: All Lemmy rules apply
2: Do not post low effort posts
3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff
4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.
5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)
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7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed
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It's because everything is buzzwords these days. They just think decentralized is another buzzword rather than a legitimate descriptor. I blame crypto.
I try to stick to the email analogy, most people have seen email threads distributed across users on a bunch of mailservers. Don't even have to touch the d-word
Do you think "instance" is a bad word to use for the different Lemmy servers? My wife thinks so, but I'm not sure what a better word would be to use other than maybe just "server", but that also feels too techy. I do think "community" is a good non-technical word to use for the equivalent of subreddits.
"Server" has been pretty normalized (albeit abused) by discord especially, so it seems accessible to me?
"Instance" does seem vague and overly techy to me, it's an oop/code term (think "instantiate the class") that's been borrowed for casual use.
"Community=subreddit" sounds pretty good, but runs the risk of being misinterpreted as more of a "community = discord server" thing...
I'm also fond of matrix's "homeserver", a server that (while your home) isn't your only location, but that might be entirely foreign to new users too.
Definitely a tricky problem
Not the guy you replied to, but to me personally the word instance comes across as technical, considering how its used in programming
Not too sure if there's a normal sounding alternative, defo could benefit from a non-techie perspective here 🤔
Ha we had the same thought tho
Crypto is decentralized, though. It's an honest way of describing it. I think that more to blame are the specific crypto users who gave it a "bad name" with their shenanigans and equally the people who took that as an excuse to dump on crypto in general.
Yeah I should have been clearer, it would have been more accurate to say I blame cryptobros.