I was looking at the Communities list, and noticing a few had no icon, I set out to design a few proposals, including a way to have different icons for Lemmy, Meta and Announcements. At that point I realized, lemmy.ml has no distinct logo.
The admins have rightfully emphasized that lemmy.ml is not Lemmy, and shouldn’t be considered ‘The Official’ instance. I think it’s important to add some clear distinction to this instance.
- The title
Look at any page, top right. It says Lemmy, not lemmy.ml.
Look at the page header. It says Lemmy, not lemmy.ml.
It’s understandable how some people might think this website is the Lemmy. Other instances change this, this one didn’t. This is probably a simple change that can and should be done immediately.
- The logo
This change takes slightly more design and effort. Ideally we could mix the two defining aspects of this instance: ‘leftist’ and ‘FOSS’. Leftist is easy, just make the lemmy a little bit pink/red. FOSS is harder to incorporate without ruining the logo, maybe a terminal underscore to the right of the lemmy, or give it some glasses to symbolize technology enthusiast culture.
Having different names is ideal, although we’d need to make one and probably change the domain name as a result. I’m not sure how complicated the domain change would be, but it seems like the ideal change for the long term.
I can’t immediately think of a good simple replacement name that captures the themes. I almost want to say ‘Melly’ just because of the current domain name: lemmy with the M and L’s swapped.
Yeah, Melly might be a good name for the instance. In hindsight naming the instance after the software might’ve been a mistake. Mastodon.social did something similar, as did lobste.rs, and it’s been pretty confusing.