Sorry if someone has already asked this. This is my first post on Lemmy. I mean, I guess you could ask the same question about Reddit but I'm pretty sure it's supposed to be Read-It. But what does Lemmy mean? Is it a cute word for a small lemon?
I guess it’s a tradition to name fediverse projects after animals and the original creator was a big fan of the Lemmings games and Lemmy from Motorhead had just died.
That one is a deep dive but it's a nod to Koninklijk Belgisch Instituut voor Natuurwetenschappen, the Royal Belgian Institute for Natural Sciences. They're all about the animals.
This gets asked a lot, but we need a definitive answer from the guy who started the project, damn it. He just won't tell us other than some vague references to "Lemmy" things. I guess there's this;
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.
I originally thought it was named after one of the authors of ActivityPub (which Lemmy is based on), Christine Lemmer-Webber. But I think that's maybe just coincidence?