@FediverseSymbol Nice symbol. Do you also have a proposal to replace the term Fediverse? I know many people, me included, who don't want to or cannot use it as a term in political debates, myself included.

Social Web was once one proposal, Open Socials is another. Maybe you've heard of other alternative naming that is more accessible in its name does not put the effort into a niche?

hi @lunch and @raphael

Now that the discussion has settled a bit, I'm able to return here for more elaboration.

I'm drawing in my criticism from previous conversations and personal experience. Let me start with the latter.

At first, the -verse suffix is an anglism and only contributes to the hegemonial project of global harmonisation and hegemony of americanised culture. Native speakers or those that don't speak other languages may not be aware.

Then there is the … 1/

@FediverseSymbol

childish suffix of the prefix, the -i in Fedi. It's a diminutive that makes it sound like a toy from the queer nerds to tinker and play with, but not like a reliable infrastructure for society to uphold democracy and diverse discourse.

Attention: Here I'm not saying that I'm trying to eradicate the queer history of creating self-governed online spaces for autonomous organisation of oppressed communities. I am talking about how the term can be used effectively in talking with regular people … /2

to transport a semantic component that produces respect and understanding for the technical achievement, while leaning in to how people are going to use it.

Which brings us to the prefix fed-. It has been said in other places, that it has very specific connotations in the anglican language space, but this is even irrelevant for the international context. Here, as exemplified above, we are pushing a syntactic element from a specific language into a global conversation, which is already … /3

dominated by said language.

While those who know what federation means and who actually care will still be able to eventually coincide the term with the meaning, again, regular people will most probably not dare to care. They are those people, who just use technology and whom we serve as being developers and providers for them.

I'm not going to be able to explain to my parents what a fantastic thing a Fediverse is, but maybe what the social web is ("Like email!") and that it is … /4

constituted by the acts and resources mobilised by people in self-relying, "autonomous" communities which choose to talk to each other.

Fediverse as a term leans in to a naming scheme, which may be established in the English speaking world, but can appear very random to non-natives. Esp. those who have not consumed much anglican cultural produce in their lives and are not used to this linguistic practice.

The neighbourhood with Metaverse also puts it into the corner of shiny marketing terms /5

which are used as a stand-in for the actual thing at play. And that is not the technical implementation ("federation"), not a childish diminutive to make it appear more appealing and also not an anonymous, ungraspable space of infinite expanse.

In Marxist terms, it's still a material infrastructure (means of production) that is produced by actual people and communities (modes of production). It's easy to forget, because our society relies on the fetish of the commodity to sell goods. Knowing /6

this we can adapt.

With my rejection of the term I am marking a position in the discourse. I am not needing to provide an answer to the supposed problem. But maybe I was giving enough good _reasons_ for why _using_ the term Fediverse is much harder than looking at its artifacts, the word and the thing it describes.

It's just not a useful vessel in many situations, where other aliases are needed.

There are more discussions like this:

- https://mastodon.social/@shoq/112747784490547334
- https://tldr.nettime.org/@tante/113000024186013430

6/6