this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2023
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Fediverse
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I would actually recommend sticking to Fediverse to REDUCE the confusion that Mastodon has caused. If people referred to Mastodon as the Fediverse or even fediversetodon or something it may help. But calling it the Twitter alternative all the time has just said "screw twitter, it's mastodon now!" and that's where people don't understand the potential it really has and then get confused. Keep referring all the fediverse sites as the fediverse and it can bring people to the smaller instances and not think that if they're not on Lemmy or Kbin that they have to make some kind of choice on which "site" to join.
What prompted this was trying to refer to the growth of the userbase on the federated Reddit alternatives as a distinct niche within the fediverse.
I’d probably call this niche of fediverse apps “fediverse link aggregators”. Their UI really only makes them useful for that at the moment (IMO - haven’t tried kbin), and you can technically follow a Lemmy community from Mastodon if you want (it’s not a great UX), but you don’t get the aggregation doing that. At least not without sorting down to just that view.
That's the best idea I've heard yet. It's not very "cool" but it solves the problem perfectly :)
As a “replacement” for Reddit (I think that moniker is selling it short, it can be so much more), it makes sense. Reddit and sites like it, depending on the specific community are really just a place to share content from outside sources and discuss that content with a like-minded community.
The other type of subreddit I’ve see are tech support style where someone is asking a question of a group of people who are likely to have a good understanding of the subject matter. I think link-aggregation-style sites are the best interface for these at the moment as well.
I like the approach, but think both "fediverse" and "link-aggregator" are just not good terms from any sort of branding/messaging/marketing perspective. They're both relatively technical or confusing and inaccurate. The fediverse isn't really a federation, which you forget once you understand what federation is in a computing sense or in the case of the fediverse, and lemmy and reddit aren't really link-aggregators, they're more like forums.
I would agree with you... except that Reddit has always been referred to a link aggregator (and forum) since I've used it. It's a bit of both.
The problem is that there isn't really an over-arching name that you can call these services because they are all pretty distinct in their feature sets. Lemmy and kbin get grouped together often, but kbin also has microblogging capabilities which sets it apart from both Lemmy and Reddit.
Ha yea ... the elephant in the room is that we probably just want to define ourselves as "Not-Mastodon".
Even though /kbin is a fusion of platform formats (which I think is awesome BTW), the underlying common factor is the primary basis of connecting or socialising.
IN the case of reddit/lemmy/kbin/link aggregators etc ... it's subject matters and interests, not direct person-to-person social connections (which aren't even possible on lemmy). It's a significant difference IMO, and well worth trying to package in a memorable catchphrase or term. I just don't know what it'd be (my best idea being "threadiverse", which doesn't capture this idea at all really).
Yeah, I'd love to setup a /kbin instance at some point, it seems pretty nice.
Yeah... I'm not good at naming things lol
I like that a lot too.
@jax @ada
I think when talking colloquially to a broader audience, "reddit-like" is good enough.
When talking internally, I don't know, "link aggregator" doesn't really describe what these are to me at all. I wouldn't call reddit a "link aggregator" it doesn't really fit what reddit is (many posts don't have links??).
I think the essential differentiator of reddit is the voting.