We're the creators of Lemmy, Ask Us Anything. *Starts Monday, 7 Aug, 1500 CEST*

Dessalines@lemmy.mlmod to Announcements@lemmy.ml – 1372 points –

This is an opportunity for any users, server admins, or interested third parties to ask anything they'd like to @nutomic@lemmy.ml and I about Lemmy. This includes its development and future, as well as wider issues relevant to the social media landscape today.

Note: This will be the thread tmrw, so you can use this thread to ask and vote on questions beforehand.

Original Announcement thread

702

You are viewing a single comment

Why did you choose to name your social media system after a person who owned the largest personal collection of Nazi memorabilia in the world for years leading up until his death. Lemmy was an entire piece of shit human being. Fuck Lemmy.

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."[8]

(*Accuracy not guaranteed)

Lemmy's obsession with nazi iconography was cringe, but I think you'd have to stretch things to say he was a racist, given his staunch and vocal anti-racist stances.

Also liking someone's art doesn't mean you have to subscribe to all of their ideological views, just as you are using lemmy right now yet I greatly doubt you agree with my stances.

I mean Nazism and Communism are religions too, make no mistake, with Hitler and Stalin as God, right? It’s the same thing.

wat

well I guess he means that Nazis are like cultist or rather any zealots of any religion in a sense that they are blindly following some ideology made up by some guy and that he therefore neither likes religions nor nazism. To saying Lemmy would "sympathize" with Nazism is just plain wrong. Of course he did have a rather weird hobby...

To the point, ideology is, to a degree, a modern equivalent of religion. It provides a framework to view history and the future, dos and don’t, utopia to strive for, often comes with own set of (almost)religious practices and idolization. It even requires a degree of faith in utopia being achievable. I don’t think it’s that outrageous of a statement.

Are museums also an issue for holding such artifacts or do you just have a problem with individuals? Because to me ownership or an item doesn't mean you agree with what it represents. Like it or not the Nazi party has a lot of historical significance.

Now I don't know anything about Lemmy as a person so he may well be a POS I have no idea but if the above is your basis for it, then it's weak.

Oh, last time i checked the criticism was because of communism but ok