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.
I agree with you that having a logo for the software and one for the instance is a really good idea. Now when it comes to the name, you should either have two completely different names or leave it as it is, I’m not much into that trend people have to incorporate the domain into the name of the project.
But having different names would help to explain it better because you’re all the time like: “Lemmy is the software upon which the Lemmy instance works, but Lemmygrad is the communist version of Lemmy, the instance, not the software.”
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.
