this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2023
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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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They're communities. And the different servers/sites are instances.
Petition to name them SubLemmys
I like communities, honestly, it sounds much less... y'know, reddity?
And also, it's much more intuitive.
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.
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.
Sublemminals? (or Sublemmynals)
Love it 😂
Instances also need better names.
Why not "servers"? That's all they are. They serve content.
Because technically, one server can host multiple instances. Instances are containerized— literally an instance of lemmy.
Is there any practical reason to actually do that, though?
Great question! Yes; hosting providers will undoubtedly exist, and some power users may want to host more than one instance on a single server to cater to slightly different audiences.
In modern server infrastructure, there’s no need to maintain the overhead of a fully virtualized operating system just to run a different instance. Containerization is the modern best practice, and with Amazon EKS or Azure Kubernetes Service, the containers just live directly in the cloud on a PaaS backend.
I'm sorry, I don't really understand, what would be the advantage of this over hosting another community?
Can you give me an example of this catering where the server would want different rules per instance?
Sorry, i'm not trying to be rude I just genuinely don't get it.
Not rude at all.
Think of the domain names. I can register multiple domains, and point them to the same server. The domain name is the instance name. So while I could have multiple communities on like SpacePirate.xyz (I don’t own this domain, fyi, just an example), and have flying and sports communities with similar rules and things, this may not make sense if my domain name is something more specific, especially if if want communities to have far more specialization.
I saw an instance called lemmyfly.org, with all sorts of communities about different, more specialized/technical aspects of flying; gliders, simming, cockpit videos, etc. If I owned this domain, but if I’m also a fan of sports, I could also have lemmysports.org, with communities for football, baseball, basketball, etc. While the owner could combine those sports communities onto lemmyfly.org, it may be more appealing to their users to make their home on an instance best reflects their interests. So if I was predominately a sports fan, I probably wouldn’t want my home instance to be lemmyfly.org. In computer science, this concept is called coupling; you want to group similar things together in one place, and similarly, not group dissimilar things together.
While mega instances might have all sorts of unrelated topics, they will not have the specialization or level of granularity that some people may be looking for… or maybe in the fediverse, it won’t end up being so appealing to tie yourself to a megainstance, lest they go the way of Reddit or Twitter (or risk of brigading, or ddos, etc). It so far seems to be idealized to have lots of smaller, specialized instances, and your home is whichever suits you best, but because you’re federated, you can still participate and subscribe to your favorite communities across instances no problem, but you may have some greater sense of pride or camaraderie in being from your home instance. i.e., in Reddit, very rarely, people will say, hey, I recognize you from such and such sub! But here, you will see people from lemmy.ca, or midwest.social, etc, and it’d be more explicit that this person is from the same instance as you, and that’s pretty cool.
I understand now, thank you so much!
What would you call gmail vs hotmail?
Providers.
But that's a provider/customer relationship, on the fediverse it isn't.
Agree on a technical level, but in terms of the average netizen being able to visualize the relationship, "providers" makes it much easier
I don't think we should try to visualize something that's not there just because it's (supposedly) easier for the average netizen.
For now. Commercial servers are possible, especially if communities become multi-instance in the future.
Every mature decentralized service calls them providers. Phone providers, ISPs, email providers, etc. I guess usenet just calls them "news servers", though.
It's provider/consumer (not customer, something being a "provider" doesn't necessarily mean they are selling stuff).
We are consumers, we consume the content that the instances provide, as content providers.
new to lemmy....
if there different "linux" communities on different instances? does this mean i have to subscribe to all of them? is there a way to see all content from communities called "linux" from different instances?
or does each "linux" community simply fight for critical mass to become the "main" linux community on lemmy?
thanks
There could be different linux communities on different instances, and to see them all you'd have to subscribe to them and sort by subscribed view. But yeah, in practice most of the time there will emerge one "main" linux community and, if it gets big enough, likely offshoot communities for different philosophies or more specificity.
A “merge identical” option in the individual users’ ui would be kind of neat, to have one page.
That does sound like a good idea, kind of like Reddit's old multireddit function.
I don't dislike the idea that there could be multiple similar communities (for example Linux communities) on different instances. That way if you have beef with one you could sign up to another; in a non-ideal world that strikes me as healthier than having one to rule them all and lots of people bitter about it. I think it's best to leave it to sort itself out organically.