1ec5 left a comment (openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website#5261)
I just noticed this renaming as I went to update translations over on
Translatewiki.net. Like others here, I was also struck by the oddity of
describing an individual as “a following” and a set of individuals as
“followings”. It’s basically a made-up word at this point. Worse, as
https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website/pull/5261#issuecomment-2613978828
points out, it’s completely backwards: a following is the people who are
following _you_, not the people whom _you_ are following.
As it’s used in social media, “follow” is a figure of speech, a
[skeuomorph](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeuomorph), for the act of chasing
after someone. The opposite of a _follower_ is a _leader_, and I think that
underscores how poorly the social media model fits this website. (And, let’s be
honest, the opposite of a _stalker_ is a _target_.)
In Vietnamese, I’ve already been translating “subscribe (to a changeset)” as
“follow”, so I’d probably do that for this as well, but “a follow”
unfortunately has no translation. The closest I can come up with would be “a
followed user”, which might as well be what we say in English. Do we even need
a user-facing word for this concept, apart from the internal data model? The
dashboard has plenty of space to say “Users you are following” (above “Other
nearby users”), and the notifications can say “[User name] is now following
you”.
As far as I know, all this function currently does is list a user on your
dashboard:
https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website/issues/3310#issuecomment-912283262.
Is the intention to eventually make this functionality behave more like a
social media feed? If not, there must be some word that better describes it
than either “friend” or “follow”. Maybe a better mental model would be “pinning
a pinned user”.
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