When you posted this, I was just telling my son about the blackout and showing him videos on it. So, yeah, maybe not related to why is called Lemmy, but fuck spez!
There's nothing old about how shitty Reddit has become when nothing has changed since Reddit went public. Run by a greedy CEO, shitty admins, shitty mods, full of ads and bots, and now getting data scraped for AI training.
To suggest this is old news is to suggest people should just forget about it and move on. Welp, nothing has changed, people haven't forgotten, and if anything, Reddit has gradually been getting even worse.
In a 2020 post, Lemmy's co-creator Dessalines wrote about the origin of the name Lemmy. "It was nameless for a long time, but I wanted to keep with the fediverse tradition of naming projects after animals.
If OP were curious why his name is what it is, he could ask the person who came up with it. He could have reasons for it, or not, but that person would know.
In this case, he's asking the community if they know the origin of the name for the Lemmy project. The answer could range from "It was completely random, just something that came up in my head" to "I thought the project reflected a trait in a particular animal, so felt the name would represent that".
So it's potentially an answerable question, unlike "why do you like chocolate?".