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^
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
oh man I wonder how often I can use this today https://xkcd.com/927/
Every now and then I think “Why isn’t X thing standardized?! Why hasn’t somebody sane come along to save us form this mess!” And then I think of that strip and realize why lol
Don’t even need to click the link to know what you’re sharing.
Haha, exactly my thoughts as I saw that link
If we’re taking a vote, I think “Magazine” is a dumb name. I saw that and had no idea what it was supposed to be.
Honestly, this specific post is the first I am realizing that “Magazine” is the equivalent of a subreddit.
Edit: if I’m being honest, I thought Community was a dumb name too.
Well, both of them are much more sensical at a glance than “subreddit.” Subreddit only makes sense because of how long we’ve been using the term, if you came to it without prior knowledge it’d be hard to figure out the meaning.
I do agree that “magazine” is pretty terrible, though. There’s no meaningful analogy between what we’re doing here (threaded conversations on a particular topic) and what’s in a magazine. “Community” isn’t terrible, IMO, if it comes down to it I’d much prefer that one.
Magazine makes sense in the bigger picture when you think about. Let’s break it down.
Microblog -> post. Makes sense you are posting a micro blog.
Lemmy has no concept of microblogging. So is fine using community and post naming.Now why magazine? If you can’t use post then you need an alternative and that’s where article comes in. You submit an article of 4 types but what should these be in. You probably could get away with collections but something that also has articles, a magazine.
Qed magazines name (note all of this is completely made up and my justification for magazine)
If I remember correctly subreddits actually used to be just “reddits”.
Yup. When Reddit launched it was just front page, now known as the (closed down) r/reddit.com. The second they opened was nsfw, third was politics.
Subreddits were launched three years later when they allowed users to start creating their own reddits on reddit - aka sub-reddits.
Channels would be a way better analogy, I think.
Magazine would make sense, if the aggregated content would be more prominent. Think Google News with comment threads bolted to each entry.
I prefer “bins” over “magazines” but if we wanted to sync linguistically with Lemmy it wouldn’t make much sense.
There should be no vote, it should just be decided between the lead devs. Users will follow and largely not care.
I nearly gave up trying kbin because of the confusing use of terms. I still dislike the term magazine, and I still don’t understand the difference between threads and articles. I just want to read/write posts.
article = thread
Yeah. Every once in a while I am clicking Microblog. Is it just random comments from people? Then I am going back to the Threads. Still can’t really use it properly but it happens. I don’t need a replica of reddit. Once this thing settles I will figure out how to use it. Honestly though, this will turn into the same thing in a few years tops, so I am remaining much more casual now.
microblog is the equivalent of twitter. Mastodon is the main way people engage in the microblog part of the fediverse, but kbin also has features that allow reading/commenting on/creating microblog posts
What you are seeing under Microblogs are mostly Mastodon posts that are flagged with the same tags as Kbin Magazines.
Not really. A magazine is a collection of articles that all are about a certain topic. It is not that hard of a concept to grasp
Plus: The polish dev called his platform kbin = karabin = rifle, the contents of a rifle are stored in a magazyn = magazine. I actually would have loved if the dev had called threads “bullets” / pocisk to keep going with the theme.
EDIT: this info might be wrong, as @minnieo pointed out. kbin is just a reference to the linux sbin folder.
I am more confused with the upvote and down vote buttons on kbin: the upvote is actually favorite, the equivalent to reddits upvote is boost, the downvote seems not to have a real function besides counting the number.
I am more confused with the upvote and down vote buttons on kbin: the upvote is actually favorite, the equivalent to reddits upvote is boost, the downvote seems not to have a real function besides counting the number.
TIL… I’ve been using the upvote the same as I did with reddit.
I’ve not been able to wrap my head around reputation points either. I’ve made several comments, a couple of posts, and my reputation has gone from 0 to -1 to +1 to 0 over the course of the week I’ve been here.
Right now, boosts increase reputation and downvotes (“reduces”) decrease reputation. From what I’ve heard, this is a mistake from when boosts and upvotes (“favorites”) were switched in some way that I don’t really understand. Upvotes should be the thing that increases karma, and the fact that they aren’t is a bug. The kbin developer has mentioned plans to fix that.
AFAIK it’s from when Kbin and Lemmy started federating, Lemmy upvotes and Kbin favourites were using the same system, while Kbin boosts weren’t used on Lemmy at all. So Kbin quickly swapped them around but hasn’t yet properly fixed and rebranded the UI interactions.
I heard boost is +1 reputation and down vote is -1. Kinda wack if you ask me.
As far as I know that‘s because earlier in development the boost actually was the upvote, but now it‘s as you‘d expect it coming from Reddit
But I think the reputation system just hasn‘t been adapted to this yet
I‘ve just heard that from someone else around here, so take it with a grain of salt
The boost also apparently sends the post out to your subscribers, whereas the upvote does not.
a different persons polish INSTANCE is called karabin. Ernest named this Kbin in reference to linux sbin and magazines in reference to retro video game magazines. dont spread this fake pro gun stuff about ernest please
mhhm, wonder if it would be possible to make a gresemonkey script that unifies everything across the platform.
Including switching the boost and favorite position. The only issue would be the url staying the same and having the /c/ or /m/ folder
When I first arrived here, I assumed magazines = communities and made some flippant comment to that effect, only to be set straight by someone more knowledgeable. They essentially argued that magazines > communities on account of the fact that a hashtag within a magazine post is meaningful to kbin but not lemmy. So the different naming underscores that they are not, in fact, identical. Though to be fair, I haven’t seen a lot of posts with hashtags to date.
if you setup tags for a magazine on kbin, posts being published in the fediverse with those tags end up in the
Microblogsection. just check it.I believe this only works on Kbin though, not Lemmy
Yes I’ll correct my post
Yeah, a magazine is more like a “topic” but that’s too broad of a term I think.
My understanding of the term “magazine” is that it’s supposed to denote that a magazine is composed of different kinds of content that fall under the same general topic, just like a real paper magazine is a mix of content (i.e. long form articles, short essays, q&a sections, photos, the fancy CD in the back, etc.) So a kbin magazine can encompass text posts, photos, videos, microblogs, etc.
While I see what you mean about the names causing confusion, as I was confused myself at first, it took me very little time to adapt. Don’t underestimate the users, most won’t care too much about what ‘subreddits’ are called on each platform.
It’s not really about the confusion, it’s just unnecessary complexity. Magazines and communities for example are completely equal concepts, the only difference is the name for some reason, probably marketing or some such.
But they are not completely equal. Yes, kbin Magazines display threads just as Lemmy communities do, however Magazines have the Microblog tab where they display posts across the Fediverse that include the tags associated with them. That is extra functionality which Lemmy does not have.
That’s like saying Facebook and Twitter should come to a concensus on how to name stuff
Lemmy and Kbin are different platforms that are compatible with activitypub (just like other platforms in the fediverse, like peertube, friendica, pleroma or mastodon, among others)
facebook and twitter are not federated
i don’t see why creating standards for less confusion would hurt anyone. i think ultimately the standards should be optional - but standards exist for a reason
But Kbin is a platform and Lemmy is a different platform, just like Twitter and Facebook are different platforms. It’s just that Lemmy and Kbin use a common protocol, ActivityPub that allows interaction between different platforms. But that does not means both platforms are (or should be) the same
I feel like it’s going to take awhile for people used to Facebook / Twitter / Reddit / Etc to get used to having multiple platforms that cater to the exact same audience. Lemmy / Kbin basically do the same thing, with slightly different minor features. Most people aren’t used to having options.
That said I feel like having some standardized naming across the fediverse wouldn’t hurt with things that are synonymous, if that’s not already happening. There’s a valid argument for magazines and communities not being the same thing
I think there’s a case to be made that some common nomenclature should be applied to activitypub implementations. For the same reason everyone can agree that an email has a “CC” line. Even though nobody knows what “carbon copying” is anymore. It’s just a standard term so everyone is speaking the same language.
some common nomenclature
It already exists. The terminology is coherent, but unintuitive - any interaction is
Activity, any user, erm… magazine or group isActor, and any interaction isActivity.I think there’s a case to be made that some common nomenclature should be applied to activitypub implementations
But there’s no standard when platforms on activitypub are so vastly different
peertube are is the equivalent of or youtube
lemmy is almost like reddit
Mastodon is twitter-like
Kbin is a mix between twitter and reddit
friendica is facebook
etc.I think is ok for every platform being different, left the autors express however they want. Maybe if you are a boomer who never touched a computer or a smarthphone ever these things may be confusing, but for digital natives? really? Can’t you catch this stuff on the fly? It must be true what they say, the younger the dumber, to the point kids today don’t know the difference between a file and a folder
I don’t think it’s even close to the same. It’s more like forum software everywhere calls a post a “post” and a reply a “reply” and not something else.
Both sites are link aggregators, both sites have sub groups that are meant for a specific topic that links can be posted to, this concept should have a name.
So should all news aggregators copy 2004’s Digg?
When terminology has become a standard, who cares what specific source you’re “copying” from? Use the standard words that everyone already knows the meaning of.
That’s like saying Facebook and Twitter should come to a concensus on how to name stuff
Twitter changed Favs to Likes to copy Facebook
That’s like saying Microsoft and Sony need to settle on either “Gamertag” or “PSNID”, because otherwise Call of Duty players trying to find their friends online will be confused.
I think users can figure things out.
What you’re proposing is pretty antithetical to the way the fediverse works. Kbin and Lemmy are two completely different pieces of software that just happen to communicate with each other. There can easily be more (and probably will be in the future) that name their version of a subreddit something else entirely. Heck, Reddit could conceivably add activitypub federation and then you’d literally have subreddits as part of the fediverse.
The entire point is that things are decentralized so the users and developers that make use of the fediverse can do whatever they want with it and so that no single person, organization, or community can enforce their decisions on everyone else.
So the problem with this idea is we’re gonna get into a big argument about whether to keep magazines or communities and honestly just screw that. A magazine is a community, a cat is a kitty. We can have two words for things.
Edit: If we do get into it I vote for “magazine” because I went there for the topic primarily.
Would also alleviate confusion for any new adopters.
there’s no need really, for new adopters or if you’re planning to bring someone to the fediverse, simply do not mention anything about it being federated and just direct them to your preferred instances (in this case, kbin). Let them just learn kbin for a while before introducing the interconnected instances.
Problem is you can easily click your way into another instance, seems to be a bit more of a problem on Lemmy though rather than Kbin
/kbin magazines, Lemmy communities and Friendica forums are (according to ActivityStreams vocabulary)
groups. However, the same applies to Mobilizon groups, which work slightly differently, allow private discussions, having common file resources, and most important of all - organising events.
We could also call these three subfeddits, which is another word to learn ;)
or simply to go ahead. All communities and forums already will be seen by /kbin as magazines, and the same is accordingly true to other software.Also, not all vocabulary aligning is actually desired - /kbin explicitly uses name
boostto align with Mastodon feature. However, both “boost” and upvote have a “boosting” effect - the meaning of the feature (being simply reblog or re-tweet) is obscured right now.Another confusing Mastodon nomenclature alignement is calling only microblog posts
posts. Majority of /kbin users are Reddit emigrants right now, and Reddit used namepostfor /kbinarticle. In reality, everything, from articles and “tweets”, through audio and video, to places, events and relationships (!), can in ActivityPub be called posts. ActivityStreams vocabulary differentiates between anarticle(long form, formatted), andnote(short, equivalent of tweet and toot), and IMO /kbin should adopt the namenotefor microblog posts - to reduce confusion (Calc- and Misskey already use that name).I could easily see it being added in options that people can see these terms as whatever they prefer. Could even be done with browser extensions/user scripts relatively simply.
“Community magazines” there perfect alternative
And we can call them ”Comzines”
Why not Magaunities? Wait, no, I see it now…
Agree and disagree.
Agree, because it would make things easier.Disagree, because one of the value propositions of the fediverse is that every platform can be managed independently, while still interacting with the same content. Heck if they call it peanuts in one platform, and oranges in the other, all fine with me
Yup. That’s the beauty of the fediverse. Don’t like the way one app manages content? I’ve got good news - there are at least two dozen other apps to choose from.
If you don’t like the way Kbin does things and think it should be more like Lemmy, just go join a Lemmy instance. Neither platform will be perfect or will satisfy every whim of every user.
I’ve found myself saying magazine/group/community to cover my bases, so having a common name might be nice.
