Yep, but jeez, Magazine is a pretty terrible name for what it’s attempting to describe… Don’t get me wrong, they can call their communities whatever the hell they want but it feels like they’re bending over backwards to avoid saying ‘community’ only to settle on a name that doesn’t even make sense. Magazines are something meant to be consumed, they’re a one way street. Communities on the other hand are a place where you’re ideally both reading and contributing. Lemmy/kbin doesn’t work without active users contributing content and joining discussions. At least reddit’s jargon had some logic to it reddit -> subreddit aka sub-community on reddit.
I agree, and I still don’t even know if they mean magazine as in the publication or as in the thing that holds ammunition - both make about the same amount of sense to me.
I find kbin more confusing overall, e.g. how you have both boost and voting available, but then for short posts boost is more obviously placed (since the up/downvote buttons are way over on the right).
When I first joined kbin the boost button had an upvote function and the upvote button had a favourite function and didn’t affect upvotes, but the dev swapped them because we were all too confused.
Ah, they’d changed it? That explains my confusion - I already had a Mastodon account so I was familiar with the boost concept, apart from how it worked in a threaded setup.
I think we have it because Kbin federates with Mastodon via the microblog section - this is also why it has two kinds of posts, “articles” (like lemmy posts) and “posts” (like Mastodon toots).
It’s super confusing at first but once you get used to it, it’s pretty cool.
The original definition of “magazine” was simply “warehouse”. A place where you amassed a bunch of stuff. This usage is still around, but it’s rare.
At the time, the military was perhaps the most prominent entity creating these well-stocked warehouses, so the specific linking of “magazine” to “military warehouse” was a natural progression. And as we all are familiar now, it later morphed into a word to describe a chamber of bullets. In a sense, a tiny little military warehouse you attach to your gun.
The definition referring to a paper catalog getting mailed to your house full of random written articles comes from one very specific one, named Gentleman’s Magazine. It was named that because it thought itself a magazine (a warehouse) of information.
I assume kbin was thinking of the latter when using the term to describe its communities. Though, considering the right-wing bias of its target audience, I expect the wordplay with the ammunition definition was also intended.
Yep, but jeez, Magazine is a pretty terrible name for what it’s attempting to describe… Don’t get me wrong, they can call their communities whatever the hell they want but it feels like they’re bending over backwards to avoid saying ‘community’ only to settle on a name that doesn’t even make sense. Magazines are something meant to be consumed, they’re a one way street. Communities on the other hand are a place where you’re ideally both reading and contributing. Lemmy/kbin doesn’t work without active users contributing content and joining discussions. At least reddit’s jargon had some logic to it reddit -> subreddit aka sub-community on reddit.
I agree, and I still don’t even know if they mean magazine as in the publication or as in the thing that holds ammunition - both make about the same amount of sense to me.
I find kbin more confusing overall, e.g. how you have both boost and voting available, but then for short posts boost is more obviously placed (since the up/downvote buttons are way over on the right).
They mean as in publication.
Boost is favourite/retweet.
When I first joined kbin the boost button had an upvote function and the upvote button had a favourite function and didn’t affect upvotes, but the dev swapped them because we were all too confused.
Ah, they’d changed it? That explains my confusion - I already had a Mastodon account so I was familiar with the boost concept, apart from how it worked in a threaded setup.
Anyway, yeah - confusing!
I think we have it because Kbin federates with Mastodon via the microblog section - this is also why it has two kinds of posts, “articles” (like lemmy posts) and “posts” (like Mastodon toots).
It’s super confusing at first but once you get used to it, it’s pretty cool.
Magazine like you put into a weapon actually applies very well to certain communities if you really think about it.
The original definition of “magazine” was simply “warehouse”. A place where you amassed a bunch of stuff. This usage is still around, but it’s rare.
At the time, the military was perhaps the most prominent entity creating these well-stocked warehouses, so the specific linking of “magazine” to “military warehouse” was a natural progression. And as we all are familiar now, it later morphed into a word to describe a chamber of bullets. In a sense, a tiny little military warehouse you attach to your gun.
The definition referring to a paper catalog getting mailed to your house full of random written articles comes from one very specific one, named Gentleman’s Magazine. It was named that because it thought itself a magazine (a warehouse) of information.
I assume kbin was thinking of the latter when using the term to describe its communities. Though, considering the right-wing bias of its target audience, I expect the wordplay with the ammunition definition was also intended.
Wait, kbin is right wing?
Yeah, the “technical” name for what people call magazines is “periodicals”