I recently noticed a post from a blahaj user whose profile was styled after Celeste from Madeleine. She does trans stuff and posts quite a bit, including to a sub¹ called "femcelmemes".
I've seem the word more than a few times in the past year, and I thought it meant "female incel".²
However, the sub in question just seems to post girly stuff and be accepting to all feminine energents "where anybody can post memes that fit the vibe." So what the hell is this vibe? I don't see any incel-adjacent stuff except maybe some facetious self-deprecation, but do you have to get incel vibes to do that?
¹ Until we can truly standardize what we call them: magazines, communities (Lemmy, please pick a better name. This is too vague.), forums, hashtags, etc..., I'm calling them something we can all understand.
² Thinking about the etymology of "incel", "femcel" should actually be "female celibate", but who in the sam hill cares.
One problem is people don't really love symbols in their abbreviations. I mean, how many people leave out the semicolon in tl;dr?
Yet the / is kinda needed, otherwise you'd need to use something like coms, which has a whole bunch of potential meanings, in addition to already being a common shorthand for communications, a commonly used long word.
Frankly just calling them subs makes the most sense, in addition to already being habitual for a lot of people. They are the sub-unit of the service after all.
Sense or not, it may be habitual for a lot of people, but it's not the established term in use. And there's also the problem that subs is a reddit term, and it mattress makes differentiation between the two platforms confusing to people that use, or used to use, both.
So it doesn't make sense to expect the entire established culture of lemmy to change to accommodate newcomers.
You know how on reddit it would get confusing/frustrating/annoying when people would call subs "channels", or "servers"? It's the same thing. Lemmy was built to be similar to reddit, but it has no obligation to placate reddit refugees by changing what it has been for years before spez shafted everyone.
Here on lemmy, community is the established term. We don't have the character limits that Mastodon has, so there's no need to use shorthand. We can type out lemmy community if using C/ is too much of a problem for the punctuation hater club.
I really don't get how this is such a problem for people. You go to a new site/service, you adapt to it, not the other way around. I dunno when you came to lemmy, but during the exodus last year, those of us that weren't lemmy regular users adapted just fine. Those of us that were sporadic lemmy users (myself included) adapted fine to stopping using the r/community name format and switching to the c/ format, and helped others do so.
It's like moving to another country with a vastly different accent and objecting to that accent.
That's funny, it never really annoyed me when people called reddit subs channels. I suppose differentiation is not particularly important in my mind. Neither is conformity, so it doesn't really bother me that much when people use the lingo they prefer, so long as their meaning is clear.
I don't see it as being any big problem, in general. I'm not personally bothered by community, either, it's the term I personally use. I do acknowledge that some people don't seem to like it though, and that too does not bother me.
One problem with your accent example is local cultures were never chosen, they evolved slowly over many years. Lemmy was engineered from the ground up, very recently. Someone chose these specific things, so you're not adapting to some long storied culture, you're adapting to an arbitrary choice some dude made a few years ago. I think this is partly why people feel more comfortable criticising it, where they wouldn't if it were something like a local dialect.
I call them cums.
Lemmy cums.
oooOOOOooohh 🫦