Personally that term makes me a bit uneasy. To me it sounds too grandiose and organized just for something that might just be some random people shitposting or chatting about their interests. And actually having tight knit communities can easily lead to all kinds of negative effects, group think, hierarchies and drama.
Of course some subreddits, forums, lemmy communities etc can be actual communities but just as a personal preference I don’t like the idea of calling them that default.
To me subinstance sounds more like a technical term, but I guess people would just call them subs anyway. I think that’s a problem in general with deriving anything from “instance”.
I guess community does a good job at being a more human centric term. You have the technical side of things, servers and software (instances) and on those you have the actual user facing parts (communities) so in that way it’s kinda fitting.
Further overthinking about the terminology I just realised that Lemmy calls joining communities “subscribing” and Reddit calls it “joining”, while I would naturally think it would be more fitting the other way around. Naming things is hard.
Petition to name them SubLemmys
I like communities, honestly, it sounds much less… y’know, reddity?
And also, it’s much more intuitive.
Personally that term makes me a bit uneasy. To me it sounds too grandiose and organized just for something that might just be some random people shitposting or chatting about their interests. And actually having tight knit communities can easily lead to all kinds of negative effects, group think, hierarchies and drama.
Of course some subreddits, forums, lemmy communities etc can be actual communities but just as a personal preference I don’t like the idea of calling them that default.
I don’t like the term community because it’s difficult to understand the hierarchy. Is an instance a part of a community? Or vice versa?
What do you think of subinstance?
To me subinstance sounds more like a technical term, but I guess people would just call them subs anyway. I think that’s a problem in general with deriving anything from “instance”.
I guess community does a good job at being a more human centric term. You have the technical side of things, servers and software (instances) and on those you have the actual user facing parts (communities) so in that way it’s kinda fitting.
Further overthinking about the terminology I just realised that Lemmy calls joining communities “subscribing” and Reddit calls it “joining”, while I would naturally think it would be more fitting the other way around. Naming things is hard.
Instances also need better names.
What would you call gmail vs hotmail?
Providers.
But that’s a provider/customer relationship, on the fediverse it isn’t.
Agree on a technical level, but in terms of the average netizen being able to visualize the relationship, “providers” makes it much easier
I don’t think we should try to visualize something that’s not there just because it’s (supposedly) easier for the average netizen.
Sublemminals? (or Sublemmynals)