Seeing some push back here on the idea of confusing things with more terms than just “fediverse”. I get that. The problem is that that cat is very much out of the bag. Surely, for the vast majority of people that have any awareness of the fediverse, they think it’s just Mastodon.
Either way, “Mastodon” is a much larger “brand” than “fediverse” or anything else on the fediverse. So trying to get some conceptual branding going makes sense. It make things more clear, as the idea of the fediverse itself is kinda fuzzy and complex and probably best left out at the beginning. It’s a little bit like the matrix, you have to see it with your own eyes, IMO.
So, my lame contribution … ****Threadiverse!**: “Social media, but woven into threads, like Reddit or Forums, not like the chaos of Twitter, but all on the Fediverse so you can find anyone else doing anything else too.”
Yes. Not being able to follow people isn’t just a UI question, it’s a core feature of the platform, and one of the main differences between microblogging and forums
[email protected] there’s nothing specifically precluding Lemmy and Piefed from following users.
You can follow users on NodeBB, and in fact because I did worked on Mastodon microblog interop first, the software only gained the ability to follow a category relatively recently.
So [email protected] has a point about it all being the fediverse, because some of what separates Lemmy/Piefed/mbin and Mastodon are artificial.
You can also follow people on Mbin too, and that’s good, but still at the moment, none of the most active Threadiverse software (Lemmy and Piefed) allow their users to.
Those limits might be “artificial”, but on the other hand, most of the userbase here has been around for more than 2 years now, and they still can’t follow other users.