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 about boardnet?
The autism collective
As the creator of Mbin I’m also calling it Threadiverse.
Thank you for weighing in, this is quite helpful! 🙏
Lemmy Federate also says this:
1: Threadiverse refers to Fediverse software that implements “FEP-1b12: group federation”. For example, Lemmy, Mbin, Guppe, NodeBB and others…
Maybe try to get a piefed namedrop there?
@melroy@kbin.melroy.org NodeBB here, agreed.
It really is the most succinct nickname to describe the type of software we are… and I feel that outweighs possible association with Threads.
I follow you now :)
Threadiverse is by far the best name for it.
Threadiverse
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.
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?
This is the correct but boring (but correct) answer.
Welcome to the cross-faggregatorverse
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 db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 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!!?
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?
A quorum of forums.
I’ve been calling it threadiverse because that is what I saw most other people call it.
Really all it is is “ActivityPub groups” or if that is too technical, “fediverse groups”.
The linked linkers, because we’re link aggregators that link together.
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
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
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
Well, if you look at the sidebar of !fediverse@piefed.social i included NodeBB. 😅
Forumverse : for any news and features about Lemmy, Mbin, NodeBB, PieFed
So it can’t be Lemmy,Mbin,PieFed. And i’m adding flarum.
However, we can create separate category :
- aggregator link : lemmy,mbin,piefed
- forum : nodebb, flarum
- Thank to Meta, i don’t like it…
- My favorite one, it remind me of forum era
- Abstract and beautiful. Poetry, bible and verb. Something we have never see before 😊.
- i’m against. Link aggregator shouldn’t be tied by a software name but a global concept as thread of forum. If i have 6 softwares…do you write them all ?
- linkagg lousy but pratical. Bad name are the best. 😎
I think we should redo the post, but, for now, let’s see where it go 😊
Edit : added answer
So far, mainly from this post bc the poll has such a small sample size, the term that seems vastly preferred is Threadiverse. Bc of its history, and how people have already been calling it that. Sort this post by Hot to see what I mean.
I don’t think Forumverse is “bad”, plus as you say it better represents the new additions of nodebb and flarum. Although that term would be swimming against the tide of people that have been using Threadiverse all this time and seem to not want to switch (possibly bc I did not explain the situation well, especially the clarification about the term Fediverse already existing, and now how the situation is a bit different wrt nodebb and flarum).
Ofc this is all just on a Sunday -> there is still lots of room for things to happen in the next coming days, to see how these results may shift:-).
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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
How so?
Jayne is gross as fuck, Mal can’t stop calling Inara “whore” every episode in a way that feels so indulgent, it’s a celebration of confederados, the list goes on.
Mal’s got this whole “I’ve got a code” and “I’m loyal to my CREW” shtick that’s trite and makes his morality too flexible which bumps against his “aww shucks I have a heart of gold” moments. They never critique his “code” which is actually pretty deranged, they just show these moments where he does the right thing and go “See? The confederado is actually a Nice Guy!”
Like let’s take a look at what he’s fighting against - yes, the government did something heinous with River, but he’s not trying to right that wrong nor was it the catalyst for why he is who he is. In fact, he goes out of his way not to do the right thing with her and constantly threatens to throw River and Simon out every time he gets in a bad mood.
Look at all these outpost towns that he ends up causing trouble in half the time because he wants to stick it to the government. He doesn’t have to live this life. He chooses it. Like I’m supposed to be proud of him for stealing medical supplies, realizing he didn’t do his due diligence in the slightest and regretted committing a crime, then not stealing it? He shouldn’t have been in that position in the first place. All he did was not consign a bunch of people to death - huge problem on their hands that happened because of him! We’re supposed to find that sympathetic and sweet?
The anti-hero thing did not age well. It doesn’t have any commentary and it doesn’t assess these moments with any sort of critical eye. Most of the crew is fine but Mal and Jayne (especially given what we now know about Baldwin) aged like milk and make it really hard to watch.
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?).
I think you’re giving Whedon to much credit tbh. I didn’t miss anything - I loved the show, I watched it a dozen times easily. Serenity a dozen more. It’s sloppy and indulgent and Jayne in particular is just vile in a way that’s vile, not funny.
We can deliberate about Mal, but Jayne…there’s no explaining that away. The only thing I’m glad we got was Jaynetown because that was just interesting on its own merits.
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.
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.
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I’ve always liked threadiverse, since it describes what’s unique about this aspect of the Fediverse.
