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
No
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.
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.
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.
How dare you besmirch the name of the frontman of the greatest band that has ever existed!
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.
musician
Who?
But Lemmy is God
Lemmy needs better marketing. The name is lame an non-descriptive of what it is. The UI, while awesome to the tech savvy is not modern enough to compete with alternatives. For Lemmy to succeed it has to become "cool" and it's not there yet and seems to lack that sort of direction.
Yeah but Lemmy is dead. Also a lost oppurtunity for the metal community to not just go by Kilmister. could flipped it to be Mr. Kill
Perhaps. First name that came to me was remmy but the real nane is remy from the movie
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.
