I think the political culture is holding it back more than the name. People poke their heads in and see an environment that is far more left than they’re used to so they head back to Reddit. It can be a shock to see all the moe/loli and communist stuff when they aren’t used to it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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