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What should the subset of the Fediverse that is Lemmy + Mbin + PieFed be called?

piefed.social

What should the subset of the Fediverse that is Lemmy + Mbin + PieFed be called?

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:

  1. Threadiverse
  2. Forumverse
  3. (The) Verse
  4. Lemmy + Mbin + PieFed
  5. Something else?

source for image

105 comments

  • 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!!?

  • 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.

    • Welcome to the cross-faggregatorverse

    • 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?

  • 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?

  • 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

      • 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

      • 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.

  • Well, if you look at the sidebar of !fediverse@piefed.social i included NodeBB. 😅

    In this post too 🥹

    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
    1. Thank to Meta, i don't like it...
    2. My favorite one, it remind me of forum era
    3. Abstract and beautiful. Poetry, bible and verb. Something we have never see before 😊.
    4. 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 ?
    5. 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:-).

  • 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.

  • 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?

  • 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?

    • Mbin "Lemmy but also Mastadon"

    • https://fedia.io/

  • 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!

  • I think, the "threadiverse" is more akin to the old (also federated, just in a different way) Usenet / Newsgroups than web-forums. So "ScoopGroups", maybe?

  • Censorverse... If you don't tow the line we'll de-federate you, this aspect of Lemmy defeats the entire purpose of federation, might as well just call it Facebook II.

    • Thats not censorship though. You can still say whatever you want, just dont act surprised if people dont stick around to hear it.

    • I feel like that's more just human nature, which occurs everywhere.

      Also, you still retain the right to say whatever you want... though conversely, why then shouldn't the other side of every single conversation likewise have the right to opt out of it?

      Unfortunately Lemmy does not offer great tools (though PieFed offers many more!) to close the enormous gap between "must federate everything" vs. "defederation, thus no longer federates anything at all". Like there's a "user instance block", which doesn't actually block instances nor users on them. So if someone doesn't like something, block it is then, bc the tools themselves offer nothing else. We are somehow more authoritian than even Reddit was over here!? Yeah, bc Reddit at least notifies you when your content is removed, and offers a modmail to communicate about it, plus a removed post remains accessible to anyone with a link, but not so wrt Lemmy, which shows a 404 not found, please try again later message when a post is removed by a mod. Seriously, "try again"?! - why, is the mod going to reconsider for some reason?

      But... it is what it is.

105 comments