Is it just random letters arrived to by keyboard mashing like a lot of federated websites seem, or is there any thought behind it?
You must log in or register to comment.
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it’s welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
Icon by @Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de
- 0 users online
- 217 users / day
- 934 users / week
- 2.44K users / month
- 5.59K users / 6 months
- 1 subscriber
- 3.07K Posts
- 119K Comments
- Modlog
Here is the answer on the Polish instance directly from @ernest, kbin’s creator. For reference, he was being accused of being a gun lover based on the name of the Polish instance “karab.in” and “magazines,” as well as his Monty Python profile pic with a gun in it.
https://karab.in/m/fediverse/p/217281/The-reason-for-the-strange-naming-and-uncomfortable-images-on#post-comment-311421
Here are the relevant sections from Ernest on the origins of both kbin and magazine:
Thanks for providing the references. This should be at the top.
No problem, hopefully it will make its way up there haha.
We still don’t know what the K stands for though.
The K stands for Kool, same as in KDE.
🤣🤣
So /sbin from Linux + k from karabin from the Polish word for rifle
But the creator doesn’t want it the instance to be seen as rifle-focused or otherwise militant and violent, so it just carries the “rifle-wielding polish linux user”-name without wanting to focus on militant Polish nerds.
I found this
(Ernest Wiśniewski is the creator of kbin)
It also explains “magazines”.
Ernest has actually said that the name “magazine” isn’t gun related and that it’s a reference “to the virtual edition of a late 90s gaming newspaper” (see this thread and my other comment for the full story)
Someone in that thread also explains that in Polish the names are different:
EDIT: Didn’t word good.
This just changed my whole worldview.
🤯
Great. Now we gotta Google what a Karabin Gun is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbine
but like… why tho?
Because of the rapid fire content, I guess?
It’s such a bad domain name
shrug
It’s Polish for “rifle”.
so it’s a “gun rifle”? why in the world would they name a platform after it?
It was a play on words, from /sbin. More info in the top thread.
Not sure, perhaps he liked the domain karab.in. But honestly, there’s plenty of weirder names out there, even among the biggest brands.
A short rifle
why tho? why is that the name of the platform then?
Because a carbine is your weapon of choice when you’re part of a small group fighting Nazis and Capitalist imperialists, and the founder of kbin is a Polish communist.
lol
Is he?
deleted by creator
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kbsp_wz._1938M
This just happens to have the “karabin” in the name but it simply means a rifle.
probably a big bin for k’s
And we’re gonna need all those different k’s if ever want to find out how Kenya is spelled.
So there are no countries starting with K in Africa except Kenya with starts with a K but starts with a K?
Welcome to AI powered search engines.
The fuuuture!
Ah, the joys of large “language” models…
So kind of like K Mart?
Fun fact, Kbin is actually where all the big Ks from all the signs went when all the Kmarts shut down. Only, it turns out they were made of meat all along, so the refrigeration costs have been pretty significant… Kbin only runs the social media platform to earn enough money to pay for it all.
Kmarts blue light bin of special K
Kbinception
I’d read somewhere that there’s some sort of Linux programming reference in the name, but I don’t know anything about Linux so I can’t quite remember. Don’t quote me on that, though
Linux has directories (folders) that contain programs. The two major conventions are /bin (short for binary which is another name for an executable program) and sbin (system/super user binaries).
Kbin seems like a play off of that, don’t know what the k implies tho.