Basically how reddit would call any given reddit sub-community “sub reddit” or just “sub” for short. I know internally lemmy just calls them ‘community’ but in a regular conversation ‘community’ might be interpreted as more broad or too general.
Thinking about it my mind would pretty much automatically go to ‘sub lemmy’, but then I felt like just shortening it to ‘blemmy’ has a great ring to it, while still being distinct. So if there isn’t already an established name, I’ll go ahead and propose ‘blemmy’.
I’ve been using “forum” as a generic word to refer to any of —
- Lemmy “communities”
- Kbin “magazines”
- Reddit “subreddits”
- … and so on.
In all these cases, a forum has similar attributes:
- It is a container for posts.
- Users can subscribe to it.
- It has its own moderation team.
- It can have its own policies.
This is pretty generic. So what isn’t a forum in this sense?
A Twitter hashtag isn’t a forum. Although it can be used to find posts, and users can follow it, it does not have its own moderation team or policies.
A Gmail account isn’t a forum. It receives messages. It has its own “moderator”: you, the account owner, can delete messages from your inbox without needing to go through Gmail’s admins. It can have its own “policies”: you can write spam-filtering rules. But other people can’t subscribe to it.
A blog without comments isn’t a forum. It is a container for posts, and users can subscribe to it (e.g. via RSS, or just bookmarking), but it doesn’t have moderation or policies because there’s nothing to moderate: the blogger is the only one posting there.
That’s a very reasonable and methodic conclusion. The only thing I don’t like about it is that if you say it outside of the lemmy space it lacks direction. Someone can say “subreddit” anywhere outside of reddit and anyone will either know what a subreddit is, or be able to find out. Talking about a ‘[name] forum’ the listener might wonder “which forum, where is it?”. Even if they know about lemmy.world they might need to ask to be sure that it’s the lemmy forum with that name, that is being referred to. In part because many other forums still exist outside of that space.
I’d say that “subreddit” is a brand name for “forum hosted on the Reddit service”. I don’t just mean in the legal sense — as you say, it tells you what service to find the forum on.
There isn’t a brand name for forums hosted on Lemmy; the local term being the generic “community” kind of ensures that. The compatibility between Lemmy and Kbin also means that I’m noticing the use of “Lemmy community or Kbin magazine” as an awkward generic phrase.
“Fediverse forum” or “ActivityPub forum” use what are likely even less-familiar service names.
So, I don’t know there’s a good answer yet!
Called communities here on lemmy.world
it makes sense
and reddit even uses the term as well
Thing is, with the naming of the communities there are plenty of cases where saying something like “the [name] community” could easily be misinterpreted. “the linux community”, “the android community”, “the league of legends community”, and so on could either specifically mean the community on lemmy.worlds, or just the general community/fan base of something. In a case where something is only meant to specifically refer to the community on lemmy.worlds, a distinct word would be pretty helpful to make that clear and leave no room for misinterpretation.
A community. That’s what they’re called everywhere in the UI.
Saw a similar post to this in !showerthoughts. Some people were suggesting the idea “sublems” which isn’t bad.
Credit to @pinwurm for this on another thread
Slice - that is the term for a group of lemmings. everyone using lemmy is a lemming. and it has the double meaning that each community is just a portion of the whole
EDIT: the post https://lemmy.world/post/891452
Yeah community isn’t a very distinct name. Perhaps we should just shorten it to commie.
deleted by creator
I like community, makes more sense than sub really. Maybe call it a com for short?
What I like about ‘subreddit’ is that it’s still very specific when you use it outside of reddit. On reddit you can easily just say ‘sub’, whereas outside of reddit you’d say ‘subreddit’ to make it very clear, what specific place you’re talking about. If I say ‘[name] community’ outside of lemmy, even someone who uses lemmy wouldn’t necessarily know I’m specifically talking about the lemmy community, unless the context already made that very clear. And that distinction can be helpful in a conversation.
The term “community” more or less settled, but if you are looking for something more distinct, there is an idea to call ourselves lemmings and the communities /c/liffs that we jump on. Alternatively we could call ourselves lemmons and the communities /c/itrusses.
Heh. I wouldn’t mind either of those ideas, they both sound pretty alright to me.
