This is all very confusing to me
this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2023
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I think part of why it's confusing is that we don't have defined names for these things. This is so early in a social media "product" life that there isn't a common understanding. You're now part of making those names. It's a bit exciting but mostly confusing while everyone uses their own terms to mean the same fundamental things. Embrace the chaos!
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and more importantly, what are lemmy users called? for reddit we have redditors, for lemmy.. lemminors?!
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Lemmywinks? South park reference https://southpark.fandom.com/wiki/Lemmiwinks
Lemmywings? Like different wings of an overall government of lemmys?
Sublemmies?
I like the idea to put lemmie in every word it is like with batman. Users should be called Lemmiathans.
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Personally, I think "forum" works.
I saw someone below mention that hexbear calls them comms with 2 m's. That sounds like the best nickname.
My brain will never not read that as "communications," I'm gonna think everyone here is real serious about HAM radio lol.
Some of us are
Oooohh. Comms has that roll off the tongue sound to it.
forum works, board also works. Instances are new to me and interesting.
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Yeah I'm still pretty confused tbh! So I'm on kbin, you have kbin next to your name too OP, but then the sidebar has reddthat.com and linux@lemmy.ml?
Does this mean we both signed up at kbin but the subreddit equivalent is linux (on Lemmy.ml)? But then how does reddthat.com come into it?
You can kindof think of the fediverse stuff as being similar to email. You and I both signed up to create an account with kbin.social. This is where our account lives and it will show up in our full username (hover over any username) after the second @. You are @autumnplains@kbin.social and I am @sxt@kbin.social.
OP created their account with reddthat.com so that is where their account lives.
Unlike email however, we aren't sending messages directly to each other - we are instead sending them to a particular "community" which happens to live on the lemmy.ml server. This is possible since each of these hosts are running software which can communicate in a common manner (this is what ActivityPub defines the rules for). You probably got to this thread from kbin's general "threads" page which is able to list posts from other hosts due to them being federated (can communicate what posts they have to each other).
As for kbin.social being put next to the right of the title for this thread, I'm not sure. I think that might just be part of kbin's UI showing where we are viewing the thread from?
The problem is that every "magazine" or "community" or whatever you want to call them (each one using a different name is also a bit of an issue) is part of their own decentralized network. Yes, you might be able to read them from other services, but it still causes a lot of fragmentation. For example when I look into something akin to a news sub for international news, I find worldnews@lemmy.ml as well as news@beehaw.org. Both basically do the same thing topically, but both have different submitted content, different users, and oddly in this case even the same owner.
This now begs the question for me as a user: Which one do I subscribe to if I want to stay informed? An article on one side could be submitted or gain traction when it does not on the other. But subbing to both could lead to a lot of duplicate articles being fed to me.
I think this is a huge issue in the whole design philosophy of the fediverse that will hamper the growth of those services. Deciding where to make an account might be something a new user gets around to, but being then confronted by this is very quickly going to turn away the absolute majority of potential users. There needs to be at least a little bit centralization to form major default communities that at least start as a gathering hub for new people. If there's issues with them then people can still create alternatives if the user numbers are high enough, but in its current form I'd have to decide between several places that are essentially the same thing.
But is it really a Problem exclusive to the fediverse? there is several large news communities on reddit as well, and you have to pick or see duplicates. Also, this is only an issue in heavily aggregation-focused communities, not in those where content is generated (memes, hobby communities) as those do not have the issue of duplicates so you can just sub to all the ones you are interested in, even if several of them have the same subject.
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This is a post to linux community (@linux@lemmy.ml) by user falcoignis (@falcoignis@reddthat.com). You're reading it on kbin since it has federated this post. The default "front page" shows federated feed (Threads).
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