Or another term which is more descriptive. This is the first thing people see when they type in Lemmy
it is perfectly descriptive. It is not a forum. I wish it was, but those went pretty much extinct. If they called it a forum it’d be lying
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit
Reddit is an American proprietary social news aggregation and forum social media platform.
Forums update threads by bumping, so threads from ten years ago can still be on the front page as long as they are active.
The term “link aggregator” was made to differentiate websites that are designed for threads to rapidly decay and be replaced by a constant flow of new content. If you tried to federate lemmy with a forum it wouldn’t really work.
Maybe there’s another term that could be used, but there needs to be a way to differentiate the two styles.
We also do have a forum sort on here, that allows infinite necrobumping (not limited to 2 days like the Hot sorts), called New Comments.
But ya I agree link aggregator is a good enough descriptor for what lemmy is: a place to post links to communities, and comment on them.
The term link aggregator makes me think of a search engine. A forum is based on user content. Forums generally make lots of new threads too. The only way forum threads stay active is when people bump them by responding to it. Lemmy posts also stay on the front page longer if people keep responding to them.
Lemmy posts are still designed to decay and fall off the front page. The posts last longer if they have participation but the only way to make something last a long time is to sticky the post so it doesn’t decay.
Forums aren’t like that. Forum threads are meant to stay around as long as people bump them and they can be ancient, with hundreds of pages of comments, and the thread still keeps getting bumped because new content is added to the thread.
Also, the way comments are organized is different. Our comments are threaded so we can have a conversation between us in a comment chain, but forum comments are sequential. The comments section of every thread would look way different if it was a forum.
Forums are just structurally different. If you don’t like “link aggregator” that’s understandable, it’s actually not very descriptive, but you still need to be able to differentiate between forums and whatever-the-heck this space is.
The important point is that people who are not familiar with what Lemmy is can understand it feom reading its description. Other suggestions are possible too.
Digg and Reddit invented the terminology and I don’t think people are unfamiliar with it.
I vaguely remember the term from yCombinator which is exclusively links and does not have communities.
Even when using Reddit for many years in the past I never heard the term. It seems like Reddit too realized that it was not a good term for marketing.
According to NATOpedia Reddit is also a forum and "social news aggregation platform
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit
Reddit (/ˈrɛdɪt/ ⓘ RED-it) is an American proprietary social news aggregation and forum social media platform.
Agree. “Link aggregator” is understood to mean “reddit-like” without having to refer to a specific link aggregator as a point of reference. “Forum” is a different though similar thing. And a lot of the lemmy communities I subscribe to are literally link aggregators like people link to articles, git repos, etc to draw people’s attention to, although I can see the issue with it referring to text posts too.
Lemmy was built as a clone of Reddit, but federated.
Reddit is and has always been called a link aggregator.
Lemmy technically aggregates links to things as its primary function, and then allows us to talk about those links.
The term “link aggregator” is not descriptive of any function. Links are posted on any medium including chatrooms like Discord.
Users can also make posts, such as this one, which do not contain external links. Thus this is a forum.
Why
Because a description is supposed to describe stuff and make people understand what it is.
But it is a link aggregator just like reddit
I think link aggregator is fine, and most descriptive of what lemmy is. Its a place to post links to communities, and allows for comments on those links.
Nobody knows what the term means. Even Wikipedia doesn’t describe Reddit as a link aggregator. For potential new users this is a massive turn off. Unless we want Lemmy to stay a niche community it needs to accommodate to layman terms.
Most people who land on the join Lemmy page don’t even know what the Fediverse is.
