Asklemmy

I confess that it is always odd to see a musician, now deceased for a decade, when searching for this platform. Mind you, that is an ongoing tribute to their legacy, which is how it came about.

In a 2020 post, Lemmy's co-creator Dessalines wrote about the origin of the name Lemmy. "It was nameless for a long time, but I wanted to keep with the fediverse tradition of naming projects after animals. I was playing that old-school game Lemmings, and Lemmy (from Motorhead) had passed away that week, and we held a few polls for names, and I went with that."

Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemmy_(social_network)#History

some would prefer the limited growth.

i picked moist because who the fuck would want to market that

Eh, names may sound stupid at first, but after saying it a million times it'll start to sound normal. "Google" sounded stupid and silly when they just first started, but now it sounds formal and makes you think of dystopia and dread.

when I say 'fediverse' people think I'm saying 'fetiverse' and sometimes they ask if it's like open source fetlife. 🫠

No issues with the name. My problem is I can’t just do a simple search and add lemmy to make it search lemmy, like you can with Reddit.

No

As the name of open source projects go, Lemmy isn't the biggest dumpster fire I've come across. It's clear how to pronounce it, at least.

You put some respect on Lemmy Kilmisters name, sir.

I have to admit, the name did directly lead to me taking longer to adopt it.

Dead musicians aside, it's not a cool name. It's not a cute-in-a-quirky-way name, and most egregiously, it's an actual name. For a person.

I think that the fediverse is held back by its name, but since I don't have a solution, I usually never mention it. I try not to observe problems unless I have some solution, no matter how weak or terrible.

Based on Twitter’s success, I don’t think names matter much. If it were named something like CockAndBallTorture, sure, but Lemmy is fine.

I don't think it has that big of an impact. But most open source developers forget that it might end up being used by more people than just them .

Mastodon. Lemmy, do a web search especially for Lemmy on reddit and you are more likely than not to end up on threads about the singer . and don't get me started on the many unpronounceable names of open source projects.

Not as much as Loops probably.

The description as a 'link aggregator' on the fediverse page is holding it back.

I don't really think the name of the software matters. My server is called The Vegan Theory Club, and that is what I ultimately want people to look for and know. The fact that we are running the lemmy software is a bit incidental imo, it is a good website platform and I think if you are looking for software it is an obvious choice and in that context people aren't going to confuse it with Motörhead

I think it's more the network effect. There aren't many users here. Like, I know the handles of all the usual posters on the Canada community.

It's indeed an odd name but holding it back from what ? Its not a popularoty contest . Why is "widespread adoption" seen as the metric for success? That onky needed for shitty commercial products, to me it's great right now..

But Lemmy is God

Things we have no interest in changing. The topics of the most popular threads (linux, privacy, open source, niche diy, programming), the makeup of the communities (occupation, gender, political alignment, etc.), non-mainstream opinions (privacy, dangers of AI, how to best spend one's time).

Lemmy will never grow as it stands. The public won't change and neither will we. Our best shot is to pitch it to somewhat technically minded folks while could operate an instance if it is set up for them. Most of us could do this pretty easily with Ansible.

The harder part is the pitch. ESPECIALLY when persuading someone to manage an instance, we need to lighten any of the opinions in the first paragraph. Something we don't historically do very well.

We also need to make things more "fun/useful". Sports trivia, more cat/animal memes, substantially less cynical comics/more "funny ones", more mainstream hobby communities (e.g. cooking, rock climbing, active D&D), random/communities with no "real purpose", communities for differently abled/neurodivergent folks with a large enough user base to provide real support.

Creature comforts. A lot of people are going to find Lemmy to be primative. Something we take for granted is we will happily embrace something "inferior" but belonging to us rather than the bleeding edge proprietary offerings. I've come to find I "love" my freedom oriented software and hardware to the point I don't even care if it shits the bed. It's like my puppy. Sure it will do things I don't like, but I'm patient with it. Most normies won't feel that way. We'd need to polish and grow the code base to include the things people expect in a modern app, but most of us don't have the skill or the time. And these additions may be things we don't want anyway

I don't see this as insurmountable. Less so as folks are becoming more aware of the invasive nature of AI. We just need to balance that et. al with the above.