I know the word normies may have weird connotations, but I just mean that, regular everyday people.
I’ve been enjoying Lemmy a lot and even recommended it to a few close friends who are working in tech. But I would like Lemmy to be way bigger, maybe have those makefriends communities like reddit has, be it gaming friends, just for chatting, for voicecalls, etc etc…
But I also wonder, could growing Lemmy indiscriminately be a bad thing? As you relax filters and barriers to entry, yes, more people can come in, but I have a feeling the quality of the people might go down aswell.
Is a clique-like platform what Lemmy is supposed to be like? Or is it supposed to try and absorb as much users as possible and be just a user-managed user-owned reddit alternative with no ads and less censorship?
I believe the answer may lie somewhere in the middle, but I’d love to hear your thoughts on it, as I’m a total newbie on here.
(Also I understand private dms on Lemmy are not secure, but you can keep the idea of the “r4r” community and just drop a matrix or session link in dms, not perfect as the admins can be what username you sent out, but at least it ends there)
Normies flood in growth is exciting for awhile, they drown out and dismantle out the core group by sheer volume, they take over things start to feel like every other social site, ???, profit, corpo takeover, enshitification, decline.
Hopefully Lemmy is built different enough to break this process, but so was everything else until it made someone money.
I’m perfectly content with letting Lemmy grow organically. If it achieves a wider user base, great, but I’m also fine if it doesn’t. I think any attempts to deliberately make it more palatable to a wider audience should be heavily scrutinized, though. This isn’t to say all changes such an audience would want are bad, or should be denied, but I’ve seen too many sites completely shit on the wants and needs of their existing users in order to have broader appeal, and I would rather avoid that.
Nice take, I can see how that could end up being a problem
More niche interests, less politics. A niche community could move to Lemmy instead of hosting their own forum for example. Either hosting their own instance or using an existing one.
Yeah, if actual communities want to come here and post about their interests that’d be awesome. Just more randoms from reddit or facebook coming in to throw out their opinions about things they barely understand and make more political posts? No thanks.
I like that the fediverse is mostly a safe space for all sorts of minorities (especially queer/trans people and autistics). I’m pretty happy not having facists call me retarded and/or treat me like an idiot for being autistic and/or having leftist opinions (although I suspect this still happens here).
By becoming mainstream, the platform will be flooded with nationalist propaganda and hate speech.
Also: There’s still some fuckery around Lemmy.world and the communist instances. Just let people have political ideology. They aren’t harming anyone.
Yes, I want to build up an alternative to big tech controlled social media so working class people can have our own voices magnified.
So you are going to stop censoring working class voices then?
Nah, I talk to the public for a living. Give me a the high-effort weirdos here, please.
I feel like this is a new user phenomenon.
When I first started on the fediverse I was kind of an obnoxious evangelist for decentralized social media.
Fast forward some years and I still love it and think it’s far superior to the closed corporate monoplatforms, but I’m also fine if the fediverse stays roughly where it is. But I’d also be happy if more people were to discover that you can be on social media without funding billionaires’ future killbot funds.
I worry a bit about waves of “normies” coming in and redditing up the place, but remind myself that federation is voluntary and I can always just go join the smaller networks that will inevitably pop up.
Like I also use snac2 to access the fediverse, and the opt-in nature of that implementation makes slowly and deliberately building a network graph of cool people feel really good.
What do you mean “normies”? Trying to start a cult, scene kid?
I’m a bit lazy to go and find it rn but I did put my own PERSONAL way of how I understand/use the term in a reply to another comment in this post, not saying I hold the stick of truth over anyone else, and im not trying to enforce any kind of action, I asked cause I like to think about things, and I thought id be better for me to listen to other people’s perspectives before “picking a side” so to speak, I have some preliminary ideas about what I think about the topic but nothing is set in stone really.
I want everybody to be included and to come together in unity. We should try that at least once during the course of human history. Oh how the elite just shuddered right now.
I think Lemmy is filled with people that just want others to agree with them, and when someone doesn’t completely agree with you on a particular subject they are somehow diametrically opposed to everything you stand for. It’s a pretty shitty place to begin with where instances fight and censor eachother. I think it would be great to bring some normalcy to this place it is completely out of touch.
A lot of normies won’t be using Lemmy or fediverse in general. It is not as addictive or personalised as the mainstream social media. Plus an avg joe doesn’t know whan an instance is. If one instance starts to get too many users, it might just shut down sign ups.
Edit: Lemmy also doesn’t have an “official” app. So it adds even more friction. Yeah a few users might get excited and use it for a couple of days and then just go back to reddit.
I don’t know why anyone uses apps for any of this. It’s literally just websites. Not to yuck in anyone.
I used an app back in the reddit days but I find lemmy doesn’t have all the cruft that I hate, so I just use the default web UI.
Being comfortable with websites is a very western thing (and I guess that is also a minority in smartphones). In countries like India, a huge majority of the people’s first personal computer was a smartphone. They either use the google app to browse the web or use other apps. No one bothers to use a web browser. It is still the case today. A lot of people don’t use a desktop here.
Interesting, I had no idea. I use my browser on my phone. Actually even when I was using a 10 year old phone, I found I had to use browser for everything because no apps would support my old Android OS.
To me the browser always seemed the more accessible option, but I’m used to using a browser from desktop it’s true.
I sympathize with people who like niche internet communities, but the main thing I want to see happen is the collapse and replacement of centralized social media sites, especially reddit, so the more people the better.
If you hand made this one rn you are a pretty cool guy, but if you had it saved up and ready to use you’re based.
If I could get on a upvote loan to upvote it twice I would, this is sick haha
fuck yeah!
I’d take “normies” any day over people who classify others as “normies”.
nothing wrong with being a normie
Why is that? Is a tag like that something you consider a bad thing? Like calling someone a geek?
It’s a form of exclusion, of othering people. I understand that may not be the intent, but it labels them as “not like us”, with contextual hints that we’re probably better off without them.
You didn’t get it wrong at all, that was the intent behind it, that not all people are healthy for a community, this wouldn’t be ALL “normies” though, but a subset of them (disruptive people), you probably have met quite a few of those in mainstream social media.
And while not all of them are “normies”, there’s been a long history of outsiders getting into geek groups and then either shaming or criticizing the hobbies of nerdy/geeky people due to “not getting it”, I do think you should exclude certain people from certain communities, like for example, not allowing child molesters and neo-nazis to hang around.
Yeah, to me it’s a tag that I consider bad. It makes you sound like you’re better than others. I suppose it comes from 4chan users referring to non-users as normies, while being pretty terrible themselves. (edit: I make this sound like I think the term originated from 4chan - I don’t, just my perception of the word)
Once you interact with “regular everyday people”, you’ll realize most of them are far from regular. Someone who’ll come here asking stupid questions about using lemmy and computer in general might turn out to be a history fanatic who can enrich the community with incredible depth. Or they might have a weird disease, find a community around it and provide support for others in the same situation.
Obviously there are dumb, boring and insane people. Many of them we can distinguish from the .ml ending. But I’m happy to tolerate even them, who knows what they’re going through.
The only kind of people I don’t want here are nazis or billionaire apologists. Fuck them.
I understand, that’s why i quoted out the term and put the first line in, but I might be wrong in how I tried and explain my thought process around this whole thing.
With apologies to the mod team, I do agree with you in that we could tolerate a more diverse group of users even if for the sake of having more numbers, and yes, fuck billionaires, been seeing that guy from the UK pop up more on youtube, yk Gary Stevenson (gary’s economics) doubling down the thing everybody already knows, rich people get tax breaks, and so much passive income that they buy everything so prices rise and living conditions get worse for ordinary people
Ok, so I admit I didn’t read your initial post with enough thought to see the actual intent, and so was a bit aggressive with my comments.
With apologies to the mod team
I’m not entirely sure what you mean by this? Nevertheless, with more users there would be more need for modding, I hope they’ll be able to handle the increasing user base. Early days reddit was able to do it, whatever that should mean.
I mean exactly what you’re saying there, more users (non-handpicked but just inviting a ton of people you know) means more work for the admins, just that.
And don’t worry about it, intent has always been hard to read over text
Yeah, but you made yourself clear at the outset and got jumped all over despite that.
you can ecsplain all you want, if you use pepe the frog ur gonna get people react to it. sorry bro, it’s gross and it gets treated as such
I don’t see why we would want to gatekeep the fediverse. If more people decided to use it over centralized social media, I think that’d be a positive development.
And as you know, the fediverse is far from homogeneous. I expect there will always be some very big general purpose “normie” instances like lemmy.world, and smaller, more niche ones for specific communities.
I don’t see why we would want to gatekeep the fediverse
OP’s account is less than a week old…
The worst part about Fediverse growing in spurts is posts like this; people who have no idea what it’s like, but “want to open discussions” about changing shit.
Something to get the blood pumping. I am waiting for when the niche communities come alive.
yeah but what if you were never ever with it?
Then either what it will be is what you’re with or what you are it simply isn’t
Sorry to get to your message this late, for some reason I missed this notification, yes, my account it less than a week old, (Ad Hominem, I don’t think the age of my account has anything to do with whatever I say, you should engage with what I’m saying instead of going after my personal characteristics like how old my account is)
I’m trying to find the place in my post where I opened a discussion about changing anything, and I don’t seem to be able to find the spot, so please let me know if I’m missing anything. I said I’m enjoying Lemmy, what I PERSONALLY would like to happen to Lemmy, then questions to try and learn from more seasoned users in the site about what they thing the site should be like, if it should grow or not, and what types of people if any should we try not to include.
I don’t see any place where a fixed position is set like: “We ought to do X”, I just see questions for both sides of the argument in the post I sent, for Lemmy to grow/Stay on the smaller side etc…
But please let me know if there’s anything wrong or off about what I said, without using a logical fallacy. If I have, I have no issues retracting/revising what I said/apologizing.
“I don’t think the previous social network of my account has anything to do with whatever I say, you should engage with what I’m saying instead of going after my personal characteristics like which network I’m coming from.”
I mean, yes? This statement as well, and this can be expanded to any variation of it that makes a judgment based on a personal characteristic instead of engaging with the argument, it’s basic logic.
There are two options, either you don’t know logic, or you do, and therefore you are aware you are engaging in a logical fallacy of your own, basically being an asshole for kicks.
Big agree with all that. Also, I’m curious what OP might mean by this:
As you relax filters and barriers to entry
Does that just mean the usual improving of interface & features over time?
In some way, yes, but I don’t think UI is as important, I like the UI we have, simple, sleek, easy to use, I mean more about communities and topics, the top communities in lemmy world are: tech, politics/news(sometimes news about politics), memes, and ask lemmy, then you have “games”.
But none of these communities follows the r4r format of reddit, in which you post to directly connect to other people, like broadly what I’m saying, is that most of the things here are “news-like” in the sense that interaction is more limited, I think having a big community for meeting people incentivizes a ton more connections (people in r4r reddits post often and read the forum often, because they are looking for friends/hookups/study partners etc etc)
With the filters and barriers I mean inviting people in, any type of people, advertising Lemmy more over the internet and I don’t like using this word but as I can’t think of an alternative right now “recruiting” people without filtering them out.
Timmy from reddit may be super right wing and close-minded, he might be a +1 as a user, but if he starts to troll and disrupt due to not being able to discuss topics in a mature manner with people with opposite ideologies to his own, I don’t think his addition to the community would be a good idea, accepting people like this (this is a scale ofc, not a binary thing) adds more users in, but creates some moderation issues imo.
advertising Lemmy more over the internet
That’s never going to happen effectively. Advertising campaigns cost money, which is something that open source projects are normally short of
Sorry, I think I made a mistake there, I didn’t mean advertising like running ads, but mouth to mouth, basically yapping about lemmy to a bunch of the people you know/chat to if other social media, like a shotgun approach to see if anyone ends up here after you talk to a ton of people.
I like the UI we have, simple, sleek, easy to use
I want to point out that the UI can very widely when hooked up to the Lemmy side of the FV. It can look significantly different from PF or Lemmy desktop and all the various apps that hook in, with different kinds of features and abilities.
With Reddit declaring war on 3rd-party apps, the user experience there is either their godawful in-house app or browser mode old / new. Just for comparison’s sake.
…in which you post to directly connect to other people…
I’m pretty sure that a big part of that perception simply stems from Reddit’s userbase being so much bigger. The ability to connect is also endemic in the Lemmy / PF structure, it just doesn’t have the number of users to facilitate that.
With the filters and barriers I mean inviting people in, any type of people, advertising Lemmy more over the internet and I don’t like using this word but as I can’t think of an alternative right now “recruiting” people without filtering them out.
AFAIK all that’s pretty much going to be down to word of mouth / etc, as always.
Timmy from reddit may be super right wing and close-minded…
People like that have been a thing forever from what I’ve seen, and indeed I think there’s a certain bias for non-ideal users who couldn’t fit in to Reddit joining the FV and other places. It many ways it makes things a bit harder and weirder here.
Lemmy on desktop, any browser, is so broken for me I’d never advise someone to try it. I assume the phone versions are better, but I’m wholly ignorant there. In any case, if they can’t get a simple web interface to function, on a large instance like .world, it’s broken.
I should add, not talking about picky shit. One example: I have to mark each post as “read” and refresh to home screen to continue, “next” is broken. Mostly the same for replies.
Seems weird. Definitely looks like something worth posting on !support@lemmy.world
Well, shit, that sounds really weird.
Are you in a position in which you can take that to Lemmy-World-Help…?
