Context: I made a poll on PieFed about the new post flairs (so if you are one of the few hundred people who have a PieFed account, follow that link and answer there). Unfortunately Lemmy has neither polls nor post flairs, so this post is to open up the discussion to the wider Fediverse, or rather the subset of it that encompasses Lemmy + Mbin + PieFed, which is called… what exactly?
Is Threadiverse too traumatic & tainted by association with Meta’s (all but entirely defunct) Threads? Is The Verse too cool/poetic/nerdy (but niche) to be understood? I highly advise against Lemmyverse bc mainstream normal people are far less tolerant of tankies than we who are here are willing to put up with. Simply listing the software available sometimes is the best option - like the Interstellar app supports all of Lemmy + Mbin + PieFed, but most support at best 1 or 2 of those - but usually is too long to say and does not roll off the tongue, plus will just keep growing as time goes on. Is Forumverse thus the least bad of the available options, or perhaps you have a better idea? 💡
Anyway, the start to a listing:
- Threadiverse
- Forumverse
- (The) Verse
- Lemmy + Mbin + PieFed
- Something else?
Threadiverse
Gonna be the odd one out here and say that all of these names are kinda stupid, but Lemmyverse is probably the best of the bunch.
The word itself sounds nice, but is the least inclusive.
That’s like saying that all of these conversations that we all have are on Lemmy.World? Sure, it’s between 50 and 80% true (users and the most active communities, respectively, including this one we are in now), but it misses a ton of nuance and detail there.
PieFed, Mbin, and now nodebb, with others on the way (flarum, perhaps Sublinks) also exist.
So why call this all “Lemmy”, when that’s only a part - granted, by far the majority portion - of the whole?
Forumverse makes the most sense but it really doesn’t roll of the tounge.
Hence I prefer Lemmyverse or Threadiverse.
Thank you for your contribution:-).
Lem-bin pie?
I don’t know about you Lemmings but I’m a Pie-head :-P
Lempiebin?
Forumverse, I guess.
(Though I’m always in favor of silly word combos, there aren’t many good ones. I like Piebin, but how do you get lemmy in there? Plebin? No thanks.)
I’d like to see more proper forum features in.fedi software. Give me the full forum experience
like what features are you wanting?
Lemmy already has the “New Comments” sort, which is the biggest feature of forums vs Reddit
Lemmy also has the “Chat” view for comments, which is good but needs to show context with them as my feature request here says https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/2544
Yeah, what features? Polls? Community flairs? The ability to restrict downvotes to only members of a community? The ability to combine multiple communities into one overarching category? And then customize that without needing admin support, and then also share that with other users? The ability to personally block every user from an instance, again without requiring admin approval? The ability to automatically label every user that has a brand new account, less than two weeks old? Or that posts 10x more often than they comment, hence might be an unregistered bot account? Or that gives and receives 10x more downvotes than upvotes, so is at best a controversial and at worst a highly toxic personality - but again, independent of an admin or moderator, and instead being totally in control of the user? Or the ability to block posts based on keywords, but perhaps not all such posts, and instead having granularity of All vs. None vs. Some? Or offering hashtags for content discoverability beyond communities and categories of communities? Or the ability to follow anything you want - a community, a user, a post, a comment (even not made by you) - and arguably far more importantly, the ability to NOT receive notifications for something that you wrote?
PieFed has all of that, and more. Lemmy has none of it. Do as you please, but now you know. Check it out: https://piefed.social/ .
Edit: even Reddit lacks many of these features. As it enshittified, it kept adding features that attempted to boost its profitability, like various forms of irl coinage, rather than provide stuff that people actually wanted to see.
I gotta check it out, thank you for the recommendation
You are very welcome 😁
gnu-verse
But that would mean that we mainly talk about Linux…
Which, yup, sounds about right!
In that case though, [puts actshually hat on], wouldn’t it be gun+verse?
I’ve been using threadiverse, but I prefer forumverse
It’s immediately clear what it’s referring to, and it leaves it open to other compatible platforms once they implement activity pub nicely. Being able to subscribe and post to official support forums from the forumverse would be a cool promo point
Also people refer to many things as “threads”. Conversations, comment sections, discord has threads. Forum is much more clear
I used to prefer “Forumverse” as well. But people don’t seem to want to use it?
While “Threadiverse” seems to predate Meta’s Threads here on Lemmy, see e.g. https://szmer.info/post/349217 and this comment from Ada https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/93840 from 2+ years ago. Tbf I did find a reference to Forumverse from 2 years ago as well, but then virtually nobody uses it again until essentially [email protected] rediscovers it a handful of months ago.
So “Threadiverse” has some history behind it, except then Meta ruined the association for many people. But… we here on Lemmy were using it first!!?
The autism collective
Might be too obvious:-).
Alternatively, The Linux hangout.
Lemmyville
That works for Lemmy + K/Mbin.
But now with +PieFed, +nodebb, and soon +flarum, and perhaps +Sublinks, Lemmyville doesn’t seem very inclusive?
I already started this as a poll about post flairs, neither of which features is nor is expected to appear on Lemmy very soon iirc. The rest of the Fediverse isn’t waiting around for coders to learn Rust and eventually getting around to adding features to Lemmyville.
So Lemmy in particular may want to not start being exclusive! It will get left behind if it does!
What about “Fedivotes” or “Votiverse?” Upvotes and downvotes are pretty key distinctives to this form of social network.
True, but doesn’t Xhitter and Bluesky and Mastodon also have a type of voting? Even if it is called or functions slightly differently?
I did not explain much of the back story, but the Fediverse is already the term used to describe federated social media, so the term here that we need is to pick one that describes the specific subset of it that focuses on threaded conversions, centered around those topic areas (called posts, and then those topics being further aggregated into higher-level topics, called communities) rather than centered around a user tweeting/X-creting/whatever their shit.
And we also have a focus on much longer-form content than those others, which like Mastodon have smaller character limits imposed upon their thoughts (so that they cannot ramble on as I have done here:-).
I don’t think likes serve the same function as votes. The downvote, the ranking as a function of score and recency, and the surfacing and consensus-building that comes as a result are the main point of this sort of platform.
By contrast, the microblog “like” (at least on a platform without an algorithm, like Mastodon) doesn’t do anything other than express appreciation.
Threads are common in pretty much every form of social media now, from friend-aggregation sites like Facebook and Friendica to messaging services like Discord and Revolt. They’re hardly exclusive to a Reddit/Lemmy-type service. Mastodon even organizes posts into threads (though I think that it does so in a much more clumsy way).
(Edit: by “don’t they have votes?” do you mean polls? Because that’s a completely different function altogether than the Lemmy/Reddit vote.)
No I did mean up & downvotes, and you added a good perspective. I don’t use Mastodon and my main experience there was Kbin, now Mbin, which has both Boosts and actual upvotes (and reduces, which aren’t shown, and downvotes).
I think you are correct: the voting was always the core behind why people liked Reddit, as compared to others at the time.
Although it seems like people are more adamant about remaining with Threadiverse, for the sake of history.
But if a new term was to be used, it would be good for it to reflect voting. Like Forumverse does, perhaps?
Yeah, I think “forumverse” isn’t bad. Though I have always felt like a Reddit-like interface and a forum interface are fundamentally different, in some way I can’t really put my finger on. I’ve been involved in bulletin board forums (fora?) in one aspect or another since the late 90s, so maybe it’s just nostalgia vs. recency bias; though it could also be the feeling that a “forum” seems like it should be hyper-specific, with different subforums on an already-niche bulletin board scoping down to even more niche and specific areas.
(Side note: Actually, now that I think about it, maybe the forum -> topic -> thread connection is why people like the name “threadiverse.” The word “thread” definitely seems like it arose from there.)
Anyway, I am fully ready to admit that I’m yelling at clouds here. Get off my lawn, dang kids and all that.
I got busy and did not respond sooner, but wanted to say that I think you are correct: it’s not merely the listing of Topics, which e.g. an RSS reader could do, but rather their ranking of those topics that was an enormous part of made Reddit so popular.
Although didn’t some forums offer that functionality, even if not all?
So as you say it’s the Threaded content, ranked by users as to priority order, that people want to see.
This ofc is all justification after the fact for us here - for whatever reason, people decided on that name, whether they should have or not, and I guess now the question is would a better name be worth the pain of switching? :-)
I’m sure there were some forum software packages that offered voting and ranking and such. All of the ones that I was a part of were quiet enough that you didn’t need such a thing, though; you could keep up with every post, even if only to decide that you weren’t interested in it, if you read it every third day or so.
I’ve been calling them “Redditlikes” or “Reddit replacements” in ordinary conversation. We won’t need terms like that forever, though.
I mean, yeah it’ll be better to have a term in which Reddit plays no part in defining is!
And this post is an opportunity to make exactly such a term!
Say “fuck spez” in the absolute best way possible - by moving on and forget that he ever existed, as we build our own stuff here.:-D
Definitely agreed.
Personally I dislike anything with -verse involved because big companies have run it into the ground and then some.
The boring, dry ways of describing them work best in my opinion.
Federated forums is the driest, most technical and to the point but not very telling.
Swap out forum for link aggregator and you have similar, arguably even more technical (certainly more of a mouthful).
Connected/linked forums might be more approachable, more readily conveying how these are separate forums but networked together.
Cross-forums may work as well to the same end, but not sure how immediately understandable cross may be in this context and outside of gaming spaces.
Whatever the case I kind of think this has things backwards. What’s more important than describing and talking about the backend tech is pointing people to any of the sites built with them that have anything of interest to them to bother with. I can’t think of anything online I’ve ever gone to or used because someone told me it was using Apache, Nginx, phpBB, or like an Open Source Web Server or using such and such CDN.
The reason why is simple: next to nobody talks like that. The only people that might are deep in web dev.
Welcome to the cross-faggregatorverse
This is the correct but boring (but correct) answer.
On the other hand, the software used has an ENORMOUS effect upon the quality and such of the communication. e.g. forum software such as Lemmy allow much longer-form, topic-based discussions than e.g. Mastodon where you have to follow a particular user account or else you won’t see anything at all. So “Mastodon” implies extreme difficulty in having conversations in the first place, especially for non-technical, normie users, and also a heavily short-form tweets/X-cretes/skeets/whatever, user-centric form of communication. Whereas Lemmy allows me to ramble on for quite awhile, and even if you don’t follow my account, by being interested in this topic, you’ll see my words.
So software isn’t everything, but it also is not nothing either.
Anyway, we could call ourselves anything we like. Brain-dead fart pirates, I don’t care, so long as we pick a name:-). It might help to pick one that people like though, especially the people that contribute much to making this place what it is.
I personally don’t mind -verse. I don’t watch most Marvel movies to begin with, and the word itself carries connotations of “the universe”, which is what we want I think bc we are talking about like “the set of all, i.e. the universe of, connected (using ActivityPub protocol) forum-like software platforms”. Hence Fediverse at the high end, i.e. including such platforms as Mastodon and Friendica and Pixelfed, but at the lower end… what there? Threads? ActivityPub Forums? Any short, catchy moniker may work -> so what is it then?
Lembipie. What else?
(And why does this particular subset need a name, anyway? The plus combo is easier to get the point across with)
It was Lemmy+Mbin.
Now it’s already up to Lemmy+Mbin+PieFed+nodebb.
And flarum and Sublinks may be added at some point as well.
So the plus syntax, now that there’s already 4-6 of them (7 if you count Kbin but there’s only a single instance in the entire world, in Poland I believe, that uses it these days, everyone else switched to Mbin), seems untenable?
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I’m not sure what you mean by that -> if you mean that we need new episodes, then absolutely! Or if you mean that real life has caught up to implementing those ideas real-time, I think that was always going to be the case, sadly…:-(
I explained it pretty thoroughly to the other comment asking what I meant. I don’t feel like explaining it again lol if you can’t see it for some reason then I’ll copy paste
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I think one of the major tropes present in the show was to demonstrate how there aren’t simply white hats vs. black hats (to use cowboy terms). Mal is a criminal, “forced” into living that way bc the government won’t “allow” him to live legitimately (except… really? Why won’t they again?). Therefore, the presence of great darkness within his lightness, or as you might prefer the presence of occasional boughts of lightness within his darkness, is not a “bug”, it’s a “feature” of the show, to walk out that yin and yang in a fantasy space opera setting.
Nobody is perfect. Some are far less so than others. Those at least tend to be aware of their imperfections, as opposed to e.g. The Galactic Empire muwhahaha, ahem cough, anyways they seem so stolid, so absolutely certain of their moral righteousness, that unlike the criminal Mal who often isn’t such a bad guy once you get to know him, commits atrocities the likes of which would turn people’s stomachs, if they knew (hence those are kept as closely guarded secrets).
So I think you missed that: from the perspective of the show, that was no accident - that was literally the entire point of what they were attempting to convey. Mal was not a “good guy”. He just had light in his darkness, the same way that the empire has darkness in its light (or is it rather the other way around?).
spoiler
sadfsadfsafa
Yay Jayne was fairly simplistic. The dude barely had any morality bc he was more animal than man. So in that way he played a “straight man” to Mal’a greater level of complexity? He even gave voice to what many of the others were thinking, including Mal himself, but they had the grace to not say it.
True evil requires a minimum amount of “character” in order to achieve anything at all - great or otherwise. So it’s less like Jayne was “bad” and the government was “good”, and more like Jayne was simplisticly animal-like, while the true evils rose up much higher. With great power comes great responsibility, or whatever.
Jayne is like a wall painting in the background - he’s scenery?
As far as Whedon, I dunno, I like a lot of his works, I don’t like his character. The two aren’t entirely connected in my mind, though perhaps they should be more so, I just don’t know.
On the other hand, wasn’t all of this pretty much happening even while the show was still in production? You mentioned that it had “aged”, so I wasn’t coming at this from a perspective of bad show vs. good show, but from it having been a good show where something external caused its goodness to have tanked. If it had been bad at the start, then we wouldn’t say that it “aged”, just that the show sucked. Which it didn’t… and yet, also… didn’t it always though? That yin and yang seemed to me to have not been so much changed by the passage of time?
Edit: oh, I haven’t heard of whatever has been revealed about the actor who plays Jayne. Maybe that’s what you meant. It might change my own perspective of the show in that case. I would hope not actually… but it might.
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I’m not getting behind a dated confederado story anymore. You are welcome to your opinions and I am welcome to mine. I think it has aged very poorly and has some seriously problematic elements/shoddy writing that can’t be simply hand waved away. That’s how I feel about it.
i think threadiverse is the move. partly because it’s already in regular use and partky because it’s very self-explanatory. forumverse could have some legs to it now that more traditional forum software like nodebb and soon flarum support federation now, maybe it could refer to the broader category containing traditional forums and the threadiverse, but i feel like leaving out the “fedi” part kinda defeats the point (threadiverse at least partially maintains it by being a pun on it). maybe fediforums is the way to go?
it’s a whole 'nother can of worms but ironically in my experience the “verse” part of threadiverse is more offputting than the “thread” part because people think “metaverse,” but that’s just anecdotal and the term fediverse itself already has too much momentum to easily fall out of fashion
Yeah and I did not clarify well here that nobody will stop using Fediverse (I think?!): that is a fine term that should continue to exist. But we also need a term for the subset of that which the likes of Lemmy, Mbin, PieFed, and now as you say nodebb and soon flarum (and perhaps eventually Sublinks?) and ofc many others will also join. What is this subset of the Fediverse to be called?
Ngl, I kinda just instantly fell in love with fediforums as you mentioned it right here. However, it also seems fairly similar to Fediverse, perhaps too much so?
Forumverse seems more distinct, from the Fediverse? As too does Threadiverse. And the latter has history and traction, but also seems a bit tainted by association with Meta, who seems to destroy everything that it touches? :-P Though importantly, we here on Lemmy were using it first! So is that enough justification to reclaim the term, in people’s minds? What do you in particular think?
