Ok. It’s time for unsolicited German facts.

The ß or “eszett” (also known as “scharfes s” or “sharp s”) is actually the combination of the old long s (ſ) and a regular s.

ſ + s = ſs = ß

Isn’t that neat? It’s also worth noting that no words start with ß, and it is lower-case only. If you need to write a word with an ß in all caps, replace it with a double s.

Straße -> STRASSE

Edit: not all of this is accurate, apparently. See comments below.

My guess before reading the comments:

“Everyone hated that.”

The developers who created Lemmy are leftists, and they run the lemmy.ml instance. The lemmy.ml (.ml is for Mali, btw) domain was allegedly chosen because ML can also stand for Marxist-Leninist.

I’m not an expert on the subject, but lemmy.ml users are known for being tankies. People don’t like that.

However, some of you whipper snappers don’t know that those of us with really old accounts joined back when lemmy.ml was the most popular instance. I just like FOSS things.

Edit: added “allegedly”