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? ๐ก
Anyway, the start to a listing:
- Threadiverse
- Forumverse
- (The) Verse
- Lemmy + Mbin + PieFed
- Something else?
True, but doesn't Xhitter and Bluesky and Mastodon also have a type of voting? Even if it is called or functions slightly differently?
I did not explain much of the back story, but the Fediverse is already the term used to describe federated social media, so the term here that we need is to pick one that describes the specific subset of it that focuses on threaded conversions, centered around those topic areas (called posts, and then those topics being further aggregated into higher-level topics, called communities) rather than centered around a user tweeting/X-creting/whatever their shit.
And we also have a focus on much longer-form content than those others, which like Mastodon have smaller character limits imposed upon their thoughts (so that they cannot ramble on as I have done here:-).
I don't think likes serve the same function as votes. The downvote, the ranking as a function of score and recency, and the surfacing and consensus-building that comes as a result are the main point of this sort of platform.
By contrast, the microblog "like" (at least on a platform without an algorithm, like Mastodon) doesn't do anything other than express appreciation.
Threads are common in pretty much every form of social media now, from friend-aggregation sites like Facebook and Friendica to messaging services like Discord and Revolt. They're hardly exclusive to a Reddit/Lemmy-type service. Mastodon even organizes posts into threads (though I think that it does so in a much more clumsy way).
(Edit: by "don't they have votes?" do you mean polls? Because that's a completely different function altogether than the Lemmy/Reddit vote.)
No I did mean up & downvotes, and you added a good perspective. I don't use Mastodon and my main experience there was Kbin, now Mbin, which has both Boosts and actual upvotes (and reduces, which aren't shown, and downvotes).
I think you are correct: the voting was always the core behind why people liked Reddit, as compared to others at the time.
Although it seems like people are more adamant about remaining with Threadiverse, for the sake of history.
But if a new term was to be used, it would be good for it to reflect voting. Like Forumverse does, perhaps?
Yeah, I think "forumverse" isn't bad. Though I have always felt like a Reddit-like interface and a forum interface are fundamentally different, in some way I can't really put my finger on. I've been involved in bulletin board forums (fora?) in one aspect or another since the late 90s, so maybe it's just nostalgia vs. recency bias; though it could also be the feeling that a "forum" seems like it should be hyper-specific, with different subforums on an already-niche bulletin board scoping down to even more niche and specific areas.
(Side note: Actually, now that I think about it, maybe the forum -> topic -> thread connection is why people like the name "threadiverse." The word "thread" definitely seems like it arose from there.)
Anyway, I am fully ready to admit that I'm yelling at clouds here. Get off my lawn, dang kids and all that.