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?”
Lemmings don’t jump off cliffs and they are not stupid. A sociopath employed by Disney threw a few dozen off a cliff for documentary in the 50s, for… reasons…? The story stuck. They’re just normal little rodents, tougher than most, as they can survive brutal winters on bleak landscapes.
https://www.adfg.alaska.gov/index.cfm?adfg=wildlifenews.view_article&articles_id=56
TIL, thank you.
I like it.
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.
Not only were they not bothered by it, they were inspired by a classic computer game, featuring lemmings falingl off cliffs.
Hmph… I chose to see it as: LET ME, and I shall persist in this.
Thanks everyone for the comments. I have been educated.
There are two truely hard problems in computer science; P=NP, naming things, and off by one safety
When Lemmy got named did no one think
I think that’s true so far.
:)
