Reddit never had to compete with a musician in search results.
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
Pretty weak reasons for picking the name tbh
Why did you pick your username?
divine vision hbu
Rather arbitrarily for mine haha
Because replacing First-past-the-post voting is the most ultragigagigantic idea possible.
some would prefer the limited growth.
i picked moist because who the fuck would want to market that
freakin canada
Greatest and best name ever.
when I say ‘fediverse’ people think I’m saying ‘fetiverse’ and sometimes they ask if it’s like open source fetlife. 🫠
In my native language, fediverse translates to “fédivers” which sounds like “faits divers” the “incidents” or “'news briefs” section of a journal.
On peut faire un site “Faits divers sur le fédivers”
Better than people assuming it’s a joke about it being full of feds, which I’ve seen before.
I have people asking if it’s a site for fans of crumbly cheese.
I do love some crumbly cheese, so I’ll allow it.
just tell them “yes!”. they will figure it out :-)
Whenever I see’fediverse’ I still think it has something to do with Roger Federer.
When I mention the Fediverse to my gf she thinks I am talking about the “Fedeverso” an allusion to “Fedelobo” a Mexican YouTuber who looks a lot like a lot of Mexicans (hence the “Fedeverso”) I don’t blame her lol.
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.
I mean… reddit?
It’s less about how it sounds and more SEO
No
You put some respect on Lemmy Kilmisters name, sir.
Finally a man of culture
Based on Twitter’s success, I don’t think names matter much. If it were named something like CockAndBallTorture, sure, but Lemmy is fine.
To be fair, the food butternut squash is doing fine even though it contains the phrase “nut squash”
The description as a ‘link aggregator’ on the fediverse page is holding it back.
Yeah for sure, what is a link agrigater?
Something ornery cause of all them teeth
Link Alligator would actually be a fun name
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.
Also I am from the American South and I have met people named Lemmy in my life. (I’m older and they were older than me but still.) The one that sticks out in my memory had no teeth from obvious meth use, skin more leathered by cigarette smoke and alcohol than the sun, and tended to wear a leather vest with no shirt.
If you’re imagining someone that was not cool, you would be correct.
So again, definitely not helping. Made me take a couple extra months after hearing about it before even researching it, because “oh, ew, it’s called Lemmy?”
Ive never met any person named “Lemmy”, nor seen it in any kind of movie. And the first time I heard about Lemmy the musicion was when I searched for Lemmy the software. For me it mostly sounds similar to cute little lemmings.
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.
Based on what I’ve learnt, what’s holding Lemmy back is that a large amount of users are fucking man babies that brigade any women-oriented communities and drive women in general away from this place, while admins just sit back and allow them to. The Lemmy mouse needs a fedora.
If it’s anything like twoxchromosomes I could see why, thanking god I’ve never befriended anyone irl that frequents that place, I assumed the drama site was a lemmy instance and mostly woman oriented but ive never seen it here so I guess not
If you think twoxchromosomes is bad because women there had the nerve to talk about their bad experiences, then actual feminist subs must’ve terrified you.
You draw false conclusions just like them lol? Where did I say its because they talk about their bad experiences.
Just went there. Top post is politics, next post is about a touchy feely doctor, there’s a few about body image, more politics, a reminder to not use period tracker apps because the USA government is literally taking women’s rights over their own bodies away, dating advice, more politics.
Looks to me like a women-oriented subreddit for discussing women’s issues, just like it always has. Could you point out some of these ‘femcels’ there to me? Should they be praising the Trump administration, swooning over pervert doctors and sharing Andrew Tate screenshots instead?
Maybe a lot are a bit angry there but I think they’ve got every fucking right to be angry right now. Don’t you?
you havent actually experienced twoxchromosomes then, that sub is femcels
Leave .world alone! (the answer to the original question is not instance wars)
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.
I am uncertain what I want. I kinda like what lemmy is now. I don’t really want it to become mainstream. On the other hand I want the corporations to fail and lemmy is the best chance we have.
there is plenty of cooking and cat pics on lemmy and an entire instance dedicated to tabletop RPGs
I don’t doubt it, to the extent some want more people on lemmy, do you think what we have is sufficient in quality or quantity in the eyes of those who we would attract? That was my point
How dare you besmirch the name of the frontman of the greatest band that has ever existed!
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…
its a link aggregator based off reddit, showing up higher in the resulrs when it’s own name is googled would be nice
Maybe, but it would be hard to pivot at this point. There’s other things that would be a way better use of dev time.
