They already have a name, straight from the documentation: "communities". You can call something a "community" and everyone knows exactly what you mean. Call it something contrived like a "sublemmy" and you have to explain it every time.
The problem lies in the federative aspect of it.
Calling the communities "sublemmies" for example, would mean that people on kbin have to call it like that too. And afaik they are called in a general way for the fediverse, just like how mastodon changed toot to post.
Does this make the platforms less unique? Yes, absolutely, but I don't think there is a fix for it.
This has been discussed before, so I'll just copy my response from there:
The term "community" more or less settled, but if you are looking for something more distinct, there is an idea to call ourselves lemmings and the communities /c/liffs that we jump on. Alternatively we could call ourselves lemmons and the communities /c/itrusses.
Hmm, after a quick Google - I vote for Slice. That’s what you call a group of lemmings. A slice of lemmings.
Ooo I kinda like this a lot! How do we get this to be official?
Could always ask the devs?
Kbin can their communities Magazines, so people are okay with alternate names for communities already.
Then again trends catch on in weird ways. What we end up calling them might be something we haven’t heard suggested yet.
Wish we could make slice catch on. Not only for the reason you mentioned, but it also implies that what you are looking at is a part of a whole. So communities are a slice of lemmy.
It could be something unbranded, like “communities,” as long as it was consistently used by all. But to have some call it topics, some call it communities, and some call it channels just gets confusing. I’m not even going to comment on “magazines.”
I mean... communities is the official term, makes sense to use it. No idea where the others come from - except magazines, that is a kbin thing.
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