Anytime I mention it to people IRL they look uncomfortable before I explain it's the federated universe of distributed social platforms.
That moment of 😬 is due to the name Fediverse sounding like 'Fetiverse.' These people aren't sex obsessed. Most are tech professionals who were on Fark, SA, Digg...etc.
I’m so pissed right now. I thought I was joining the fetaverse but I can’t even find a single user talking about delicious crumbled cheese made from sheep’s milk
Most people have no idea about the fetish circles and the languaged used in relation to them. They recoil at "fediverse" not because of sex association, but because it's a really lame sounding name.
Maybe it's your pronunciation? I'd just make the 'd' a bit softer and put emphasis on the vowels. But then I don't really know, my first language isn't English and though we have the same word for "fetish", it has a lot more harshness to the 't' and especially the 'sh' so I've never seen anyone jump from one to the other when I said it out loud.
I guess OP means it sounds like "fetish", but this looks like a retread of the "what if people think the fediverse logo looks like a pentagram?" hypothetical that didn't have any root in reality either.
@noobface certainly not a problem I've dealt with in 12 years of being on #Fedi. May be your circle of friends. In that case I'd recommend just calling it "ActivityPub" which doesn't really cover all of the 'verse, but its what most people mean when they say fediverse anyway.
What is the fetiverse? I've never encountered this issue. The main issue is there's not enough activity for people to want to use it when I bring it up to IRL friends
We're building a new federated social media universe to distribute it rather than it being centralised in a few single companies like Meta and Reddit. It consists of several different service ideas like Lemmy, Mastodon and PeerTube, over 40 in all. Each of those has hundreds of different instances where little and larger communities share with each other and with other communities and services. We call this Federated Universe the fediverse. Wanna join?