[openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website] Modify the way "Friends" are added (PR #5261)

[Minh Nguyễn]

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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