Basically how reddit would call any given reddit sub-community “sub reddit” or just “sub” for short. I know internally lemmy just calls them ‘community’ but in a regular conversation ‘community’ might be interpreted as more broad or too general.

Thinking about it my mind would pretty much automatically go to ‘sub lemmy’, but then I felt like just shortening it to ‘blemmy’ has a great ring to it, while still being distinct. So if there isn’t already an established name, I’ll go ahead and propose ‘blemmy’.

  • fubo@lemmy.worldM
    5·
    1 year ago

    I’ve been using “forum” as a generic word to refer to any of —

    • Lemmy “communities”
    • Kbin “magazines”
    • Reddit “subreddits”
    • … and so on.

    In all these cases, a forum has similar attributes:

    1. It is a container for posts.
    2. Users can subscribe to it.
    3. It has its own moderation team.
    4. It can have its own policies.

    This is pretty generic. So what isn’t a forum in this sense?

    A Twitter hashtag isn’t a forum. Although it can be used to find posts, and users can follow it, it does not have its own moderation team or policies.

    A Gmail account isn’t a forum. It receives messages. It has its own “moderator”: you, the account owner, can delete messages from your inbox without needing to go through Gmail’s admins. It can have its own “policies”: you can write spam-filtering rules. But other people can’t subscribe to it.

    • UberDragon@lemmy.worldOP
      1·
      1 year ago

      That’s a very reasonable and methodic conclusion. The only thing I don’t like about is that if you say it outside of the lemmy space it lacks direction. Someone can say “subreddit” anywhere outside of reddit and anyone will either know what a subreddit is, or be able to find out. Talking about a ‘[name] forum’ the listener might wonder “which forum, where is it?”. Even if they know about lemmy.world they might need to ask to be sure that it’s the lemmy forum with that name, that is being referred to.

      • fubo@lemmy.worldM
        1·
        1 year ago

        I’d say that “subreddit” is a brand name for “forum hosted on the Reddit service”. I don’t just mean in the legal sense — as you say, it tells you what service to find the forum on.

        There isn’t a brand name for forums hosted on Lemmy; the local term being the generic “community” kind of ensures that. The compatibility between Lemmy and Kbin also means that I’m noticing the use of “Lemmy community or Kbin magazine” as an awkward generic phrase.

        “Fediverse forum” or “ActivityPub forum” use what are likely even less-familiar service names.

        So, I don’t know there’s a good answer yet!