My guess is that the namer wanted the connotation to be: LET ME.
How exciting!
But honestly — I try to get people to join and inevitably they say…”Why, so I can follow all the other stupid lemmings?”
deleted by creator
From wikipedia:
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.”
So I would say no, they seemingly weren’t worried that Lemmy users would be referred to as Lemmings and be turned away due to it, or they just weren’t that bothered by the idea if it did occur to them.
Hmph… I chose to see it as: LET ME, and I shall persist in this.
Thanks everyone for the comments. I have been educated.
No. We all thought about the association to Lemmy, the guy from Motorhead.
This was the original name inspiration
Well, I mean…
It’s considerably better than “Redditor”.
When Lemmy got named, it was a safe haven for half a dozen communists.
No one thought about alienating normies.And now do the same people see it as a vehicle that could possibly dismantle corporate social media hegemony?
Scare us away? Some of us are on instances that make the connection more obvious.
Being called “twits” never put people off Twitter.
That’s great!
That has never crossed my mind, I’m thinking heavy metal when I think about Lemmy Kilmister / Lemmy.
But I do think lemmings are cute, and that old video game was awesome, so it all sort of works for me :D
How many Gen Zers even know what a Lemmy is?
Anyways, I call people Lemmies
Ok Lemur
I (18yo) don’t! I have no idea what ppl here are talking about and I sure didn’t figure out.
The name Lemmy grew on me lol. I thought Reddit sounded dumb af once upon a time too. In fact I still cringe at the thought of being called a “redditor.”
A word for users of a website to self-identify as a group will rarely not be cringe. Like, come on, is this how you self-identify?
Doesn’t work so well here as the content is platform neutral. We’re all just “users”, really.
Not all of us are using Lemmy, for one.
I use mbin or kbin because that ugly rat and the name, lemmy are stupid. That’s just my opinion.
I use Mbin, but as a mountain person I feel strongly for defending lemmings. They’re adorable little hamsters who get really worked up about pretty much anything.
Honestly, lemmings are a good metaphor for the community here. We’re tiny, but we stand up and fight against something must larger than ourselves and we refuse to back down. I just hope we don’t work ourselves up to a heart attack over it.
