or maybe some other terminology would be better? lots of people get confused when you ask them to choose an instance, sometimes I think even the word “proxy”, “host”, or “hub” is simpler
the specific terms aren’t my point, just a discussion to see if we can come up with a better name
I don’t think it’s about the term, “server” and “instance” both make sense to me. The issue is that the fediverse itself is pretty confusing.
The basics? Great: it’s vaguely “IRC but persistent”, all good.
But for starters it’s hard to keep track of which instances actually exist - new ones pop up and old ones die at the drop of a hat.
Then there’s differences in feature sets (lemmy vs kbin and whatever else) that happen to be ActivityPub compliant or whatever. kbin notably doesn’t federate downvotes, for example. And all this software is still relatively immature.
Then there’s the actual “who federates/defederates whom and why” debacle. This results in a lot of obvious and some less obvious visibility issues.
Then there’s (other) individual instance politics.
Then there’s the “meta” about all of this, which is getting confusing.
A couple of these will have parallels on e.g. Reddit - I assume this is the natural comparison to make and will keep being so for a while - like sub drama and the relationship between subs. But because the FV has this at the instance level, (and each instance has many “subs”,) it’s a whole level up in complexity.
Then there’s how all of this makes for a pretty un-reddit-like experience - and Reddit is not the king of polish, either. While Reddit has duplicate subs, it doesn’t have a design that almost automatically causes them to be created and distributed, across instances without actually correlating them afterwards. The end result is that subbing or blocking any one community will likely involve doing that manually on several instances, which is stupidly inconvenient. Also discoverability is much trickier which is worsened by the low activity.
My point is: call it what you want, but a) I don’t think that’s where the confusion is coming from - that’s just the fediverse being confusing (and outright clunky in many regards), and b) obligatory XKCD “Standards”.
Personally, I’ve been using the words “site” or “website”, because I think highlighting the fact that each instance is its own independent website clarifies the issue to a large degree.
But you’re 100% right. It just doesn’t alleviate the sense of overwhelm people feel. And I don’t know that anything really will, except for repeated and continued exposure, because networks of quasi-independent actors are complicated things, and the world is now full of people who have experienced the internet as little more than 5 insulated websites. The mental model that people have for social media is just “everyone’s reliably using the same website as me”. The idea that different social media websites are communicating with each other, and also that those social media websites don’t have a billion accounts – and don’t need a billion accounts in order to be viable – is just… alien. To the point where even those of us who are engaging in the experiment kind of sweep the essence of the space under the rug, you know? Everyone treats “Mastodon” as a singular location. This here is “Lemmy”. “kbin” is over there, at a particular URL. If we treated the rest of the internet with this level of abstraction, I’d have to tell you that I was “On Firefox” right now, or telling my wife about this meme I saw “On macOS”, or “at my desk”.
And like, sure, some of us have a deeper internal understanding of federated social media. We heavily used IRC in the past, or get grok how email works, or whatever, but the fact that we still all kind of collectively brush aside the heterogeneous and quasi-independent nature of the network when actually using it in practice I think speaks to just how heady it all really is. And I’m not sure there’s a linguistic solution to it. It’s just an incredibly messy space in a world where people crave simplicity.