According to the GitHub of Lemmy, the main reason the name Lemmy was chosen was because of Ian "Lemmy" Kilmister, the lead singer from MOTÖRHEAD. This is highly problematic and racist because Ian "Lemmy" Kilmister is an avid collector of Nazi paraphernalia. Social justice warriors and woke NPCs will tell you that you cannot separate the artist from the art, so LemmyNet, the unpaid mods, and woke Lemmy users are actually supporting Nazi ideology by choosing the name Lemmy due to MOTÖRHEAD's Ian "Lemmy" Kilmister. The racist name of this service will be a huge obstacle for it becoming mainstream.
Although this may not be a problem for the NPCs as they support the neo-Nazi group Azov Battalion, which is part of the National Guard of Ukraine. The founder of the Azov group is Andriy Biletsky who was said that Ukraine’s national purpose was to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade … against Semite-led Untermenschen [inferior races]”.
Besides the blatant racism and anti-semitism of Lemmy, another reason why it will fail is the rampant censorship and defederation. Defederating keeps users in echo chambers and isolates them towards more extreme groups and ideas. Mastodon and Lemmy are home to jannies on steroids and haters of free-speech. Take a look at any modlog of a community and you will see many legitimate posts and comments removed often with no reason given. It doesn't make sense for Lemmy to be a "alternative" of Reddit if it has MORE censorship than Reddit. The unpaid mods of Lemmy must stop discriminating against people that are not establishment supporting social justice warriors.
If these serious issues are not addressed, Lemmy and other 'decentralized' networks have no hope of competing with Reddit any time soon.
TLDR:
- Lemmy must change its name because it is racist and problematic.
- The level of censorship has to decrease expeditiously