I'm a Reddit transplant. I get the name Reddit (I read it) or at least that's how I figured it got its name.
Lemmy though? At first it reminded me of lemon 🍋 I looked up "lemmy" and found an origin of the name, which means "Devoted to God" and is a diminutive of Lemuel.
But where the service's name originates is partially from the name of Ian Frasier Kilmister, aka Lemmy, from the band Motorhead.
The origin of his name:
"The name originated from his often said sentence “can you lem’me five?” oder “lemme a fiver?”." (Source)
Then finally the Wikipedia reveals full information that the creator partially took the name from Lemmy the Motorhead band member, and a game called Lemmings, which he had been playing at the time.
This is in case anyone has wondered why this interesting service has such an odd name!
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn't work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world, !lemmybewholesome@lemmy.world
My mum has been a single mum her whole life, and when I was a kid she couldn't always get the most popular games but I believe she was told Lemmings would be very good. She got an entire box set, including a Christmas edition! At first I was of course distraught, until my brother installed it on his PC and I would constantly ask to play it. So many hours went into it, and it's not the first time my mum had really surprised me with something I didn't know I'd end up appreciating so much. I think I still have it somewhere...
Thank you, I often do. I sometimes show her the Pacman game she got me whilst abroad, thinking it was Pokémon Yellow, and reminding her that I actually really enjoyed it and wouldn't have known about all the various collections of Pacman if she didn't follow my very crude description of Pikachu (which thinking back, could have been describing Pacman as well lmao).
She's going through chemo treatments, so it's more important to remind her of these things. For me at least.
Open source people have a history of...questionable naming schemes (looking at you, GIMP). We should backronym Lemmy to something more normie. I'll start:
Weird. I always thought it was from the game. Throughout reading what you typed, I was expecting something unexpected. As it turns out... It was what I expected, unexpectedly.
Lemmy from Motörhead is the only other Lemmy I ever knew. Therefore, it was clear to me, that the name our our new home is a homage to the god of rock & roll and whisky.