I prefer this too. Lemming means a small rodent. It’s one thing to be apart of a site with a rodent mascot but another thing to refer to myself as a rodent, lol. No thanks. Not to mention the other derogatory definition of the word. Lemmies is cute and close enough to Lemmy.

Edit: I misread the definition of lemming and thought it was a group of rodents that included rats, but they are different creatures belonging to the same superfamily Muroidea that includes rats, mice, and hamsters. But I still don’t know if I want to call myself a Lemming. I’ve already seen people make fun of those here who call themselves Lemmings when I checked out the instance that was recently defederated from lemmy.world. I think it’s a name that could be an easy target for those who want to hate on the Lemmy userbase. Why make it easier for them? It could turn off future users. Although I can feel sorry for the animals that their name has some derogatory definitions like being a synonym for sheeple, if we are to call ourselves Lemmings, we need to come up with our own definition of it that’s more positive. Even then I don’t know how well that will work.

Wow, I didn’t know defederation was a thing until reading the comments in this post. In that case, I agree with the OP that not leading with federation when promoting Lemmy is probably the best.

Nice to see the growth! I came over from reddit, hearing about Lemmy when the blackout was being planned. Lurked a few days and finally joined today! I really like Lemmy.

I’ve been on reddit for a looong time (arrived there during the migration from Digg) and have seen other migrations from reddit and this one seems most successful and diverse. Way to go reddit for pissing off thousands of subreddits instead of just one or two. The upside of that for us is a variety of communities created in our new home so there’s much less of a reason to go back to reddit. Many thanks to everyone creating, contributing, modding, and admining here!

Aside from maybe a few niche subreddits until they find their way over here or I find a replacement community somewhere else, as of now I don’t plan on going back to reddit. I haven’t been there since the day before the blackout. If I’m really curious about what’s going on at reddit, I just check teddit as long as it’s available.