Mechanized greater amalgamation carries a presumption of agreement and agreeability. This is not what I experienced on Reddit.

For instance there was r/gamedesign. It had serious problems of people staying on topic, and lesser but recurring problems of people becoming most uncivil. I started r/GamedesignLounge in opposition to this. I "ruled" with a firm hand unfamiliar to Reddit users, but quite to old guard Usenetters. All posts and comments required moderator approval. I would have been perfectly happy to share this in a double-blind comoderator system where I don't approve my own posts, but such a mechanism doesn't exist on Reddit. All subs are run by the "Lord of the Manor". I was a nice, disciplined LotM and my job primarily consisted of hitting Approve. The fact of requiring people to adhere to the rules up front, rather than waiting for people to offend and be dealt with later, definitely elevated signal-to-noise ratio.

But I got no members and no surfacing. The incumbent name that anyone would look for, "gamedesign", is already owned by someone else with critical mass. Opposing such a de facto group with "better moderation ideas" is pretty much impossible on Reddit.

Another example is the TV show fan sub r/TheOrville vs. r/USSOrville vs. r/OrvilleVSTrek . The last one died. The 2nd one is barely alive. I've refused to participate in the 1st, in solidarity with the 2nd and 3rd. Nobody cares though.

For awhile, there was only one r/vikingstvshow about the series "Vikings". I don't know about now; don't care. Turned out it was not for fans of Vikings really! It was more for people to hurl rocks at Vikings and say this sucked, that sucked. Mods were totally down with that and fairly negative about the show. Somehow there weren't enough Redditors interested in Vikings to support multiple subs about it, so the one dominated by negative leaning mods, ruled the roost. Anyone who actually liked the show, after getting the barrage of pissing and moaning over and over again, pretty much you packed up your stuff and went home after awhile.

In the case of Game of Thrones, there were enough people to support quite substantial, separate subs with very different moderator policies. And the different communities mostly hated each other. Tons of institutional inertia accrued to the sub that first managed to grab the "Game of Thrones" name though.

I got banned from r/CobraKai. I got a little wound up about what would really happen in the modern USA, if you had some karate jackass kicking you in the head on some beach somewhere, like in the original The Karate Kid. Someone would probably pull out a gun from their glove compartment and blow the other away. That's fact, in the real world. Happens all the time. Happens between 12 to 15 year old kids in my city. Makes the newspaper headline regularly. Well that's just too negative and toxic to be saying in the sub for some reason, so I get banned.

What if I want to go talk about this show somewhere else, where having a real sense of real world violence, and making comparisons to the fantasy world of the show, is ok? Not that CobraKai material is itself at fault here. They did their juvenile detention episodes. Its the heavy handed mods that were the problem, not the show. Well, r/CobraKai is reaping all these incumbent advantages of traffic shaping, having the name of the show.

So far from wanting to consolidate communities, I am thinking communities should not be allowed to monopolize valuable brand names for community participation. I'd like to think that "Game of Thrones" could have at least 5 different communities, all with "Game of Thrones" technologically part of their community name. I haven't really thought through what the differentiator would be... the most trivial default designator would be a number. You might be on GOT 1, someone else might prefer GOT 2. Others prefer GOT 4. GOT 5 decided "5" wasn't doing them any mindshare good, so they change it to the non-default "GOT - Icicles" or some such. But GOT would be a way that you quickly found all such groups, when searching.

This could admittedly lead to a long list of GOT groups, like 200 of them, and games to see how you climb to the top of such a list. But it might actually be a better circumstance, than just ceding all this valuable word territory, to whoever had the luck of first starting with the most obvious name.

I wonder how much sleep early network people lost about communicating through the ether. Or late 19th century physicists for that matter.

Burkina Faso?

"The Fediverse is stupid."
"The Fediverse is stupid."
Negativeland said Christianity is stupid.
Christianity is stupid.
Communism is good!
[then a lot of chanting and noisemaking]

"forum". It's correct. Short for web forum. Social media forum if you really want to get picky.

Y'all talkin' on the verse.

Dang I totally forgot all about that term. Been awhile. Well it eventually reduced to "surfing the net".

The thing about the internet, is it was the thing to make it only one net. Previously there were weird systems like bitnet, VMSnet, where you had to juggle email address encoding standards to get balkanized college campus networks to talk back and forth to each other.

"The web" became the subset of the net, that worked with web browsers. Only one thing.

Was there a "The Facebook" period? Or was that just a movie name?

So then we passed through a period of brands. Reddit is a brand. It is not altogether surprising that people would refer to the fediverse in terms of brands. Lemmy, kbin, beehaw, whatever.

Email and the web had/have specific protocols associated with them. The fediverse has multiple protocols. We're using ActivityPub, which seems to have won as a standard. It isn't exactly catchy or smooth flowing off the tongue.

Ok, if we try to brain crunch all these previous trends, here's what it's going to be called, if it hasn't been already:

THE VERSE

The difference between the fediverse and the universe will be forgotten. Linguistically, people will not keep up with that detail. Only old timers / early adopters will notice that linguistic change.

Possibly, 'verse' will come to be seen as short for multiverse.

Reddit is also turning into this weird police state lately about NSFW vs. SFW sub designations. Where which standard gets applied, is about whether you recently changed anything during protests. Wouldn't be entirely shocked if someone could get caught in a new round of hyper-vigilance. Not that I even bothered to read the OP's claims or links. I don't care and it doesn't matter.

My mental image of Reddit corporation and admins right now is all these Dilberts running around into tables in a conference room. Maybe like a pinball machine.

Rule #1 about amish. You don't talk about amish.

Rule #2 about amish. You don't talk about amish!

In real life some of these spaces I never did laundry in, and nobody was doing laundry, because the beer and music were far more important. Especially when the laundromat was in another part of town, so I'd never actually haul my laundry to it.
It was this weird business that various people would try to run. A friend of mine started up this laundromat that was also a whisky bar. He took us after hours to check it out. I had already had a bunch of Belgian beer and I got so sick on the whiskey, sickest I've ever been on alcohol in my life. Still can't consider a smoke flavored whiskey to this day.

No I don't. I find most people's videos incredibly boring, even if they're supposed to be on an interesting subject. Making videos is so common that lots and lots of people are terrible videographers. They just let things drag on, they waste people's time. So making a video of a subject that is also boring, looking over the shoulder or listening to someone play a game, is even worse.

I'll watch my Mom play a video game in real life for like 30 seconds. That teaches me something about what she's doing, and that's all it's worth. I'm an indie game designer and developer. I see it; I get it; that's all I need.

Games are interactive and are meant to be played. I can't relate to people only watching games, at all. I know people do it. I cannot relate to it in any way. It is alien to me.

One thing I've realized about people's YouTube play sessions, is they get their audience more from the audio they're doing, than from the video. Because people listen to these videos, while they're eating dinner or doing laundry and so forth. Their eyes and hands are on something else.

In the early 2000s I went through a whole period of mythological city building with the game Zeus. And there were real laundromats in Seattle integrating alcohol, board games, video games, and even music performances in them. I still see laundromats in other cities today with an arcade cabinet in them, and more than once I've thought, "Why can't this be an arcade game that doesn't suck?" They haven't gotten any money out of me. So I can relate to the idea of building out a more swank laundromat, 90s / 2000s style. But by that same token, mythological city building is better than laundromat building, and more period.

I actually haven't perused the builder game space in quite awhile. There was a long period where my extreme jadedness was justified. Minecraft Alpha for instance was terrible as a game. But it was a bunch of kids' first game, that was a big part of it, that they had no preexisting concept of what should go into a proper builder game. Another was insider cult rituals of finding secret stuff to do in the game, how things worked. Went hand in hand with outsourcing "why you bother to play the game" to social media.