Kbin and Lemmy should come to a consensus on how to name stuff
Reddit Migration@kbin.social – 134 points – Is there really a reason, for example, for there to be the distinction of "magazine" and "community"? When you're federating, the same features should be called the same, if close enough. That way everyone can talk with everyone about stuff and we all immediately understand each other.
Would also alleviate confusion for any new adopters.
^I'm pretty sure this is going to be impossible though, since each sides egos will likely get in the way :D^
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Why? This is like going to a foreign country and demand they change their laws because you don't like them.
It's fine as they are, it doesn't take much to understand how they work, a few days of confusion won't kill anyone, having everything spoonfed to you all the time is detrimental to the mind.
This is very much what this is like. Kbin and Lemmy do not have to confirm to reddit's norms. I'm glad it's different here.
I don't understand why you'd be glad the same stuff has different name depending where you are accessing it from.
And it's kinda whatever, not that hard to grasp concept of magazine=community but it's a hindrance especially to newcomers. Maybe just call them magazine-community or something to avoid confusion.
This is how language works. People will call them whatever they want and eventually everyone will learn these things are synonyms. There are even people calling them sublemmys even though that's nowhere in the UI of lemmy. Newcomers will be a little confused and then they'll learn and it won't matter.
That's not because of language evolving with the need for same thing from different places or nickname that's grown out of a subgroup. It's by design, kbin (afaik) is a fork of Lemmy and decided they want to use a different name - maybe because they wanted to differentiate themselves from Lemmy, I'm not sure actually why. Certainly they didn't take into account both Lemmy and kbin growing side by side both profiting from other's success. Either way, it's a failure of design for the fediverse, time will tell if it actually matters though.
(You can sure argue language works by assigning word to describe thing but usually it's meant that meanings can grow and change with time with the population.)
And I'd argue sublemmy thing is a thing at all because community-magazine thing isn't that obvious. You never heard anyone in Reddit call them anything else than subreddits or subs.
Language change doesn't have to result from a "need" for a new word. It can happen just because ppl choose to use a different word. And the developer of kbin is a Polish speaker. Maybe he chose "magazine" because the Polish word makes more sense to him than "community" (I know about the rifle pun. Wordplay works even better when there are multiple meanings)
Either way, my point is we currently have at least 4 words to describe these things (group, community, magazine, sublemmy). Users will coalesce on one or learn that they're all synonymous and won't even notice when someone uses a different term than they use
Yeah, language can be changed by a (conscious?) design decision. But whether that change is necessary is up to debate and just because you could doesn't mean you should.
Some users will learn the terms and some won't but what I mean is that it's a hindrance either way. And defense isn't "that's language" the defense is "that's my design vision".
I just hope we don't end up calling them "sublemmys" and whatnot, like what I keep seeing suggested. Let's just make a clean break with reddit and start something new and better.
Yes, a clean break is what I'm going for.
Agreed, it really isn't even too confusing to explain either, Kbin uses magazines, Lemmy uses communities, but they are basically the same thing. Kbin and Lemmy are separate platforms, and shouldn't be forced to use the same terminology just because they're compatible with each other.
Saying they should do something isn't a demand. To me, it'd be more akin to the EU sharing currency, various regulations, etc. It just makes things easier for those within it and tends to be mutually beneficial, but it does take same to find agreements that every member is cool with.
I feel like it’s not that bad to be uniform in some ways though. There’s lots of different email sites, but the way they’re organized/labelled is very similar.
I feel like if you want that kind of beautiful system where everything’s decentralized yet still able to talk to each other, then it’s better if some things are standard.
Even the general strategy kbin,lemmy, mastodon use have similarities to be able to talk to each other. They’re all on the fediverse.observer where we can see all their stats in one place. There was uniformity in a good balance. All three of these use activity pub, which I hear is a good thing. If not, I think there would be less synchronization? And then people might say, hey, we should let everyone develop the way they like, and it’s true, but there’s a good benefit in making some stuff the same