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  • From my memory, folks were hanging out in the discord (the discord came before the website as a group of folks who wanted to start a different kind of community) and were talking about possibilities for the site. Early on there was talk of developing something from scratch (in fact, I think a working prototype was developed before it was decided to pivot to lemmy) and the admins needed something to name the github repo. As I recall somebody stuck their head in and just said the word "beehaw" and it stuck. I could be mixing things up, the timeline is a bit fuzzy and it's possible there were other discussions happening that I wasn't aware of. But as far as I remember it pretty much came out of nowhere and everybody just kinda shrugged and said, "that's the one".

    • The person who suggested it just got a beehaw tattoo and loved it. To me, it was instantly clear it checked the following characteristics of good branding or appealing attributes:

      • Reasonably unique
      • Coherent branding/image
      • Open to enough interpretation to inspire ideas
      • Cute, short, recognizable
      • Bees are awesome and important to the world
      • A good level of modern absurdity
      • Some kind of je-ne-sais-quoi amalgamation of clear US imagery without being pro-US, inspirational/motivating, action-forward, idk what else to put here but just like, good in the way yahoo is good but from a different cultural background

      • I think I saw you had commented this on the discord a while back, and I still had not made the connection just now that they had gotten a cowboy bee tattoo before suggesting the name.

      • So beehaw was a thing before this website existed, right? I’m not from the US, English is not my first language and I can’t find anything about it on the internet except pictures of bees with cowboy hats. Is it a cute slang from some region? If so, what does it mean? Or just a pun?

    • As soon as I saw whoever that person was that said 'beehaw', I immediately went to Namecheap and purchased 'beehaw.org'.

    • To add to this, I dug up old stuff and it turns out this was probably because the same person who came up with the name had a few hours prior suggested we use this great bee art for the server icon!

      • I love it so much. And the crab is their little fren, and they go out riding on the open range together to gather flowers and pollen. Best buds.

23 comments