this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2023
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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I like communities, honestly, it sounds much less... y'know, reddity?
And also, it's much more intuitive.
I think "sub" is what people are going to call them reguardless. It is just internet language at this point, a subdivision of a community (by community I mean lemmy as a whole) is called a sub. Weather it's a subreddit or sublemmy. I'm not saying bring reddit with us, I am just saying the internet can take the term "sub" with it and use it elsewhere.
Personally that term makes me a bit uneasy. To me it sounds too grandiose and organized just for something that might just be some random people shitposting or chatting about their interests. And actually having tight knit communities can easily lead to all kinds of negative effects, group think, hierarchies and drama.
Of course some subreddits, forums, lemmy communities etc can be actual communities but just as a personal preference I don't like the idea of calling them that default.
I don’t like the term community because it’s difficult to understand the hierarchy. Is an instance a part of a community? Or vice versa?
What do you think of subinstance?
To me subinstance sounds more like a technical term, but I guess people would just call them subs anyway. I think that's a problem in general with deriving anything from "instance".
I guess community does a good job at being a more human centric term. You have the technical side of things, servers and software (instances) and on those you have the actual user facing parts (communities) so in that way it's kinda fitting.
Further overthinking about the terminology I just realised that Lemmy calls joining communities "subscribing" and Reddit calls it "joining", while I would naturally think it would be more fitting the other way around. Naming things is hard.