Quackhouse came about from an agreement in a matrix chat. The chat was free to join and posted on this instance. It was composed of people who wanted a new instance. We didn’t hold such a discussion publicly as to prevent people from domain parking.

We were wanting to distance ourselves from Lemmy (in name only, the devs are very volatile and give it a bad name, plus lemmy being difficult to explain to more casual people who’d appreciate the forum without an overwhelming technical explanation of how it works. Lastly we wanted a unique identity, like how beehaw or shitjustworks have) and Reddit (for obvious reasons)

We wanted a fun recognisable name, we did come up with ideas like “bri-ish” and I think something along the lines of “ukonline”. We tried a pub theme also with “localpub.uk” and “thelemmingandthed.uk” but people opted for the duck theme and “quackhouse” as it sounded fun.

Personally, Quackhouse wasn’t my first choice. But it’s what everyone was happy enough with come the vote, so that’s why I stand by it.

To elaborate more on the unique identity thing, we wanted to have a name we could use to spread in lemmy circles like joinlemmy.org. generally people who already know about Lemmy and want to join wouldn’t really care about “lemmy” being in the name. So we thought it actually could detract more.

However, then we had stage two: word of mouth spreading / promoting. Generally just tell people about the site, the unique name wouldn’t require explaining the fediverse, there was an idea floating about with “Tell them it’s a UK based forum with no trackers or ads and is donation funded”, they’d see the content from federation and by the time they realise what’s happening, they wouldn’t be intimidated by the idea.

Also had a small plan to even post a lemmy client on the play store which by default points to the new instance, name it after it and everything, just for fun :P

We were and are committed to lemmy, would only jump ship from it somehow died or became obsolete (there’s no plans on moving away from Lemmy being the actual software or any Lemmy features)