Reddit never had to compete with a musician in search results.

  • Hanrahan
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    61 day ago

    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…

    • @[email protected]OP
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      17 hours ago

      its a link aggregator based off reddit, showing up higher in the resulrs when it’s own name is googled would be nice

  • @TBi
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    261 day ago

    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.

  • Captain Aggravated
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    132 days ago

    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.

    • @MajorasMaskForever
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      42 days ago

      I’m curious as to what the worst one is. GIMP is pretty bad, KiCAD has pronunciation problems, nothing else is coming to mind

  • wuphysics87
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    51 day ago

    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.

    • @[email protected]
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      51 day ago

      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.

    • @[email protected]
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      21 day ago

      there is plenty of cooking and cat pics on lemmy and an entire instance dedicated to tabletop RPGs

      • wuphysics87
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        220 hours ago

        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

  • wuphysics87
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    42 days ago

    How dare you besmirch the name of the frontman of the greatest band that has ever existed!

  • Onno (VK6FLAB)
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    713 days ago

    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

            • @WraithGear
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              103 days ago

              It took me three hours to decide upon mine, this was back when i needed one for the xbox 360. I literally sat there on the set up screen, and thought. You should see me struggle with character gens.

              • @[email protected]
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                32 days ago

                Way back in 1997 or so, I was not sure what to use, so I just chose “Foxtrot” from the phonetic alphabet because it sounded a little neat, and it has my favorite animal in it. It was not such an issue because you could still get that name everywhere at the time of course. Since then, I have mainly used variations of that, but at some point branched out into some others such as the one I use here.

                It’s always kind of funny to me though, when I go through some old backup and see one of my forum signatures with my original name on it.

                • @WraithGear
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                  2 days ago

                  For me i went with WraithGear because i personally feel that i am not here, or real, that i am just piloting my corpse around. It crossed with my thoughts on gaming due to making an xbox account and all, and i have a framed art cell of metal gear acid on my desk, and it all kinda clicked. Its gear as in metal ‘gear’ more so then a cog.

  • @[email protected]
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    322 days ago

    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.

      • @redhorsejacket
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        32 days ago

        Just anecdotal experience to relate, but the opinion I see most commonly in various threads is that being concerned about SEO and growth metrics and the like fundamentally misunderstands the opportunity the fediverse provides.

        At least for me, it’s nice to have a corner of the internet where, for the most part, discussions don’t escalate to the polemical levels that occur when everyone needs to shout to get a word in edgewise.

        I admit that my logic stems from the impulse to gatekeep, but my intent would be that we tend to our gardens, as it were, and let the folks who are seeking that kind of experience filter in at a natural rate. For example, while I don’t think that Lemmy needs to juice it’s SEO, I do think it would be a good idea to continue to improve the onboarding process for folks that don’t give a rip about the tech running their social media.

        I’m willing to entertain arguments to the contrary, but I think that this approach encourages growth by improving accessibility, while not overwhelming the aspects of the culture that has gotten folks to stick around here at all. The assumption I’m operating under, and I acknowledge its optimism, is that a person who finds themselves on Lemmy is clearly looking for a different experience than what traditional social media offers them, even if they can’t articulate what exactly it is that they’re missing from corporate owned platforms.

        To that end, I don’t think it’s necessary to try and ensure our Lemmy beats out Lemmy Kilmeister, who is the singer I’m hopefully correct in assuming people are talking about lol

    • @rustyfish
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      123 days ago

      Well, there is that one guy…

    • @WraithGear
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      73 days ago

      Are you a “Dead like me” fan? Its the code word you set up to let your family know your not dead yet.

      • @[email protected]
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        22 days ago

        I love that show. I just started rewatching it, after rewatching Coupling. Giving me all the nostalgia.

        • @WraithGear
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          2 days ago

          Its a world where the clean up of souls is differed to designated souls who for one reason or another can’t pass on. These souls are given a new body and are assigned to a cell to replace the one who reaped them. They are told a location, a time, and a name. And have to find the person about to die and pull the soul out before they are killed, else the soul brings the trama of death over with them. In the protagonists case she is put in the “freak accident death” group. Which reap people who are indirectly killed by demons mostly. It’s forbidden to reach out to your family for obvious reasons, but due to her mother HATING the word “moist” and considering it a sex slur, she leaves behind a message saying just that and the mother instantly catches on.

  • 🏴 hamid the villain [he/him] 🏴
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    2 days ago

    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

  • Diva (she/her)
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    333 days ago

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

    • kratoz29
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      322 hours ago

      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.

    • Semi-Hemi-Lemmygod
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      173 days ago

      TBH the kink community has been needing a replacement for fetlife for a while

      • @[email protected]
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        22 days ago

        Oh my gosh, how nothing changed when all those people were getting murdered through the site? So scary!

    • BlackEco
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      113 days ago

      In my native language, fediverse translates to “fédivers” which sounds like “faits divers” the “incidents” or “'news briefs” section of a journal.

      • Binette
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        62 days ago

        On peut faire un site “Faits divers sur le fédivers”

    • @[email protected]
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      3 days ago

      Better than people assuming it’s a joke about it being full of feds, which I’ve seen before.

    • Zagorath
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      73 days ago

      I have people asking if it’s a site for fans of crumbly cheese.

    • qprimed
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      73 days ago

      just tell them “yes!”. they will figure it out :-)

    • @paultimate14
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      43 days ago

      I’ve seen people ask why the Fetaverse has nothing to do with cheese

  • @[email protected]
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    132 days ago

    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.

    • @[email protected]
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      42 days ago

      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?”

      • @[email protected]
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        72 days ago

        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.

  • @[email protected]
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    112 days ago

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

    • @[email protected]
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      42 days ago

      To be fair, the food butternut squash is doing fine even though it contains the phrase “nut squash”

      • @redhorsejacket
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        42 days ago

        Why stop there? “Butt Nut Squash” was right there!

  • @[email protected]
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    82 days ago

    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.