Curious to know, I'd heard "lemming" used in a semi derogatory way, since "a person who unthinkingly joins a mass movement, especially a headlong rush to destruction" is the dictionary definition. It seems to be the first thing to come to mind as to what you'd call a Lemmy user.

This platform certainly is embodying a mass movement to get off of reddit, and I'm definitely all for it! But I can't help but feel this could be one of those baby names that sounded cute and catchy but could be bullied later into life. What are your thoughts?

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago (6 children)

@Redecco

I've been thinking about this for a little while now and I think Fedditor is the best choice.

Between Lemmy and Kbin, there's already two choices of software platforms for Reddit-esque link aggregators that work together. In the future there may be more. I think the term should be inclusive.
Fedditor is play on redditor, a widely used term for users of the privately owned Reddit. A fedditor is a user of a Fediverse alternative.
Since ActivityPub is an underlying protocol that interfaces with the rest of the Fediverse, I think emphasizing the Fediverse aspect and the "reddit-esque" aspect is more important than the specific software platform.

People may use different terms for Lemmy vs Kbin vs future alternatives (or ones I just don't know about), but they may also use different terms for the instance they use or for the magazine/group that they are a part of. I think if any term becomes widespread, it should be an inclusive term that fall underneath a more general term such as Fedditor.

[–] Redecco 3 points 2 years ago

I think my initial instincts were Lemmings for Lemmy, Kbinners for Kbin, and yeah when it comes to the Fediverse as a whole there's a lot of room to play with the Fed in it. I'm having a hard time adopting Fedditor since it makes me think of Feta cheese + redditor, or like a f-ed up redditor haha. But I totally get your logic, universal sort of nicknames make sense across the different apps.

Speaking of which I have no idea what a Mastodon user would be called, I guess Twitter you'd just say a "Twitter user" so the same would go for it.

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