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?
When the first Reddit migration happened, the migrants called it #Threadiverse and has always been that way. Although some tried to change it (Threads was not around yet, or public, IIRC), it didn’t work, the migrants prefer Threadiverse so it stuck.
Changing names in the Fediverse is not easy since it has grown humongous already. Back in 2008 it was simply called #Identiverse. Then a few years later it morphed into the #Fediverse (this was before ActivityPub, yes, the Fediverse is years older than ActivityPub).
Back in 2021/2022, we tried to change the name “Fediverse” because Twitter migrants and the Press/Media were whining too much about it. Even though we reached a consensus, the we were far too small compared to the number of new people.
The people who kept on complaining about the name “Fediverse”, when they were asked to participate in the disucssion and polls, they did not. When they were presented with the new name, they either ignored us or started whining again. 🤷🏽
Anyway, if there’s a huge population involved, it’s not going to be easy.
Now, I’m not discouraging you, rather, I shared our experience in the hopes that you’ll find a better way. Because personally, I’m not so fond of “Threadiverse”, haha.
If you use, for example, the lemmyBB interface, it’s no longer “threadi”, it’s a forum. 😝 (I know, lame reason.)
Oh! One thing that came out of trying to rename the Fediverse, people don’t want “-verse” anywhere because it’s overused. Multiverse. Metaverse. Fediverse. Threadiverse. Benverse. Omniverse. Panverse. Whoverse. Trekverse.
What was the new name? I’ve heard open social web.
It started as a suggestion, then we compiled it and made phases of polls. (The instance clised shop, unfortunately.)
Based on those, the most that got the votes was the suggestion “Mycelium”. It was inspired by Star Trek: Discovery and the real-world mycelium.
The second one, I can’t remember but it was also related to nature’s fungi or plants.
The list of suggestions and votes were based on who participated. And at the time it was done, it was the Twitter Migration, and people were complaining loudly about the name “Fediverse”. And yet, those who participated were mostly pre-Migration people (who generally didn’t have a strong issue with “Fediverse”). 😄
Tagging @Snoopy@piefed.social.
This is a great summary of the history of the topic, thank you!:-)
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Hmm… I like the -ville suggestion. #Threadiville perhaps?
- The #Fediverse is the “universe”.
- The -ville is the “local group”.
- The various software are the “galaxies”.
- The instances are the “planets”.
- The various software are the “galaxies”.
- The -ville is the “local group”.
So:
- Fediverse
- Threadiville local group
- Mbin galaxy
- Fedia IO planet
- Kbin galaxy
- Kbin social planet
- Nodebb galaxy
- Lemmy galaxy
- Lemmy World planet
- Mbin galaxy
- Microville local group
- Mastoforks galaxy
- Pleroma galaxy
- Writingville local group
- Plume galaxy
- WriteFreely galaxy
- Ghost galaxy
- Faceville local group
- Friendica galaxy
- -key forks galaxy
- CMSville local group
- Hubzilla galaxy
- Drupal galaxy
- Wordpress galaxy
- Threadiville local group
😁
- The #Fediverse is the “universe”.
@OpenStars In the past we had gotten into the habit of calling the set of thread-based environments #threadverse, but the advent of the terrible Meta service has polluted this denomination.
Personally I would use the expression #topicverse
Topicverse sounds kinda nice.
To be fair, people were using Threadiverse before Meta revealed that they were working on their Threads. And now they do not want to switch?
What about boardnet?
Bc a network of forum boards?
Yeah. I think it has a good ring to it. Maybe forumnet.
aggriverse
Is that bc of this being a post aggregation? Then wouldn’t it be an “aggreverse”?
fedeverse?
I like that one, but it makes me think of agrivate or agriculture
Or “aggressive”
B-b-but Lemmy isn’t known for aggressive, opinionated users, i-i-is it!? :-P
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.
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?
Welcome to the cross-faggregatorverse
A quorum of forums.
The autism collective
Might be too obvious:-).
Alternatively, The Linux hangout.
Threadiverse
I need ad-like branding on what Mbin and PieFed are.
Im too lazy to look it up
They both have features that Lemmy lacks.
Like PieFed has polls, post flairs, hashtags, categories of communities (basically multi-reddits), which are user customizable and shareable, and a lot more. Though lacking quite a bit of polish such as post and comment previews, and very little to almost no official app support (though an API was recently released and Thunder is being tested, and Interstellar already supports it). It’s newer than Lemmy, but written in Python rather than the difficult Rust language, so in many ways has already surpassed Lemmy in terms of features (and even Reddit in some ways too, especially since the only new features there for the last decade were solely aimed at increasing profits rather than good experiences for the users).
Mbin’s primary distinction is also supporting federation not only with Lemmy (and PieFed) but also Mastodon. And it has a different interface that some people prefer to Lemmy’s. If you want both the Threadiverse/Forumverse/Whatever and Mastodon integration with a single account, this is the only option atm.
Both PieFed and Mbin are entirely separate implementations of the ActivityPub protocol, so whether you actually use them or not it is worth celebrating that Lemmy is now not the only one that implements this forum/thread/basically Reddit replacement style (other notable implementations include Friendica a Facebook replacement, and Mastodon an X/Twitter one, Pixelfed I think an Instagram one, etc.). Especially with Lemmy’s association with “tankies” that tends to drive many people away (e.g. 100% of the people that I’ve ever told about Lemmy irl; and Reddit’s r/RedditAlternatives is filled with stories of people who don’t want to come here bc of all the BoTh SiDeS sAmE rhetoric that we allow here, plus Lemmy is somehow more authoritian than Reddit even, having a modlog but no modmail, no notification of a moderation event, no ability to discuss bc it simply says that a “mod” did it, and you don’t have a right to even so much as be told that your content is now removed! instance admins have much more freedom here, it’s fantastic, but actual users only have what manages to trickle down from them, and the software itself very much reflects an authoritarian mindset, even in comparison to Reddit).
Btw, fuck spez.
TLDR: Lemmy isn’t the only game in town, yet we need a name that is both distinct from other Fediverse tools (Mastodon, Friendica, Pixelfed, Loops, etc.) while also being inclusive to the other Reddit replacement tools, currently Mbin and PieFed, but in the future including Sublinks, and who knows what else?
thanks this helps alot :P
no ability to discuss bc it simply says that a “mod” did it
this is actually an option for instance admins to choose
Mbin “Lemmy but also Mastadon”
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?
Lem-bin pie?
I don’t know about you Lemmings but I’m a Pie-head :-P
Lempiebin?
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!
Bulletinfedi?
Forumverse gets my vote out of the listed options.
Anything containing “fedi” is going to scare people coming from the USA, for the foreseeable future, unfortunately:-(.
Because of confederates?
I’m guessing the concern is “the feds”, a pejorative term to refer to undercover police?
As an ESL, I thought that was “narcs”?
That’s “narcissists”.
No, it’s narcotics officer.
That too. Short for narcotics officer. But can also generally mean to snitch now in slang.
Edit: usage example: to narc on someone
“don’t narc on me bro”
“don’t let Jeremy find out, he’s such a narc”
As an American, I don’t connect “fedi-” with the feds.
That is halfway a joke.
We also still have Fediverse, to encompass everything that implements the ActivityPub protocol, e.g. Friendica, Mastodon, Pixelfed, Loops (planned but not implemented yet iirc?). So the Threadiverse/Forumverse/Whatever is meant to distinguish from that.
But Bulletinfedi is distinct enough I think?
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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.
