This is not going to be a blogpost about “Why do people still use Reddit instead of everyone moving to Lemmy?”. I noticed that even with Mastodon users, who already understand and like the advantages of decentralized platforms, the usage of Lemmy is extremely small, and more people use Reddit. Most of them haven’t even heard of Lemmy. To be fair, the Reddit usage also seems to be fairly low.
I don’t think you’re wrong but I question how much the name really matters. As a name, Reddit is also kind of confusing until someone explains the pun and has historically been seen as weird. Only reason it’s not weird now is cause it’s popular. The name “lemmy” could just as well see the same happen.
I agree, Reddit’s name isn’t why people use it, but critically it doesn’t hold people back from using it.
Reddit is a satisfying enough word, doesn’t disparage it’s users or sound like a childish joke, and doesn’t conjure images of rats or rodents.
I don’t love it but it is a much better name than Lemmy.
I agree with you here, if people have no problems using Tiktok or Bilibili or Zalando, Lemmy shouldn’t be much worse.