I don’t think many people understand that if they use Lemmy or kbin, they are posting to the fediverse. There are other platforms and will be more to come. Referring to a post on “Lemmy” or “kbin” is like saying you saw a post on your Windows or Mac computer.
We should be referring to it as…
- I saw it on the fediverse.
- Hey fediverse users …
- A thread on the fediverse…
New terms may emerge but referring to the platform seems weird, almost ignorant.
edit: A better example is email. You wouldn’t assume everyone is on Hotmail because that is the email provider you use. You say I’m sendingan eamail, not I’m sending a Hotmail.
Mastodon is at least something of a more generalized term at least, because that’s referring to hundreds of instances. And it has a specific (Twitter-esque) format that unites them. But Lemmy and Kbin has the same formatting structure (Reddit-esque). Makes me wonder if we need a specific, but generalized term that unites everything in this format.
Well, the Twitter-esque format also extends to Misskey and Pleroma, and there are tons of those accounts interacting seamlessly with Mastodon instances. So in a way those microblogging instances face the same issue you’re describing between Lemmy and Kbin. In any case, I’m a fan of ‘threadiverse’ as a term for the Reddit-like instances.
Threadiverse. I like that. It’s dumb in the best kind of way.
In Usenet days we called them newsreaders.