this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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Reddit Migration
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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.