Top and bottom

The issue is acronyms; there's millions of products, schematics, datasheets, and manuals that refer to them as MISO and MOSI with no further explanation. Any new standard that doesn't fit runs into the 15-competing-standards problem, and ought to be followed by an "AKA MISO" every time it's used.

I’m the passive one in my relationship.

Anyway, the Sub is supposed to be the one that's actually in control for this kind of thing

I think there's a better way to put that. It's often called a power exchange. Both people involved can rescind consent at any time, and there's also negotiation that happens before scenes to set up expectations and limits, but I don't know too many subs that want to be in control of a scene. My experience is they want to give up control in a way that is safe.

I thought the connotation was chattel slavery, not BDSM.

I'll always like Primary/Secondary.

I’ve seen ‘Active / Passive’ used, that seems alright

That's not always an accurate description though.

Consider a redundant two node database system where the second node holds a mirrored copy of the first node. Typically, one node, let's call it node1, will accept reads and writes from clients and the other node, let's say node2, will only accept reads from clients but will also implement all writes it receives from node2. That's how they stay in sync.

In this scenario node2 is not "passive". It does perform work: it serves reads to clients, and it performs writes, but only the writes received from node1. You could say that node2 slavishly follows what node1 dictates and that node1 is authorative. Master/slave more accurately describes this than active/passive.

There’s plenty of alternative terms to use without borrowing terminology from sexual roleplay.

Do I have news for you ....

Active / passive means something different.

Master / slave means one thing tells the other thing what to do, and the other one does it without question. The slave is not passive in performing the task.

It's a relationship that should never occur between humans, but it does occur with machines. The terms describe what is happening accurately. Other synonyms are approximations and lead to confusion in a field where confusions cause bugs / failures and depending on what you're working on, that could put lives in danger. Do you really want such confusion around the systems of an airliner, where everything has redundancy, master/slave relationships are common and something being passive means "it's only monitoring what's going on"?

You want more Boeings? Shit like this is a good way of getting there.

Also pub/sub is already estsblished and used as common computing abbreviations