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)
The fediverse is about offering an alternative to the monopoly power and political control of the large corporate sites. The more people are here, the less control those have. That is a good thing and far more important than any kind of elitist snobbery people here like to indulge in.
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?
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
Yes, because it will fail otherwise. If only Linux nerds and tankies hang out here, than every community is just a slightly differently flavored tankie/linux community, and we’ll die on the vine. We want normies to see the value in the fediverse, because then they’ll start to ask why they should be giving all their privacy to big corporations.
as long as we have enough options to curate our feeds it should be fine.
Reddit doesn’t have voice calls as far as I know, but I haven’t paid close attention.
It doesn’t, but there are reddits for the purpose of finding people to voice chat with using other platforms
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.
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.
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.
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!
One thing late-stage Reddit really had going for it is that, for any niche topic or hobby, you could find a sizeable active community.
I still have to visit that place from time to time, but I’d rather be on Lemmy.
I actively use reddit as Lemmy is small and lacks a bunch of the communities I like, but I’m making it a point to use a bit of Lemmy every day, even if it is to put one comment or one upvote in
I feel that if people are committed to staying active on this platform it will remain at a steady number of people and slowly grow, and as it grows more, it becomes more and more enticing to post as you know they’ll be more interaction due to having more users, snowballing so to speak into being a bigger platform.
You realise in your first paragraph you’re doing the thing that’s the reason for your second paragraph?
No, I don’t quite understand what you mean
People need to use Lemmy for Lemmy to be useful.
You’re still going to Reddit and keeping it alive instead of actively choosing to vitalise Lemmy.
What do you suggest I do if neither the communities nor the number of users here are sufficient to support the niche things I do on reddit?
And using reddit =/= not participating actively on Lemmy. If you are trying to convince me not to use reddit at all, to take away my vote so to speak and leave them with a -1 user, I feel that’s noble in a way, but in the practical sense, at least for now, reddit is way better to find stuff in since it is filled to the brim with users.
People can use both for a while, growing out Lemmy to a comfortable enough place to drop reddit for good, and while im not the most active person ever, if you check my profile, ive done 7 posts and 78 comments here since I’ve joined (its been 4 days)
If you have any advice on the issues I mentioned I’d be more than happy to listen and try to learn something.
I personally just DDG search for something and will read a reddit thread if it comes up but won’t actively go there to look for stuff on Reddit. If I think it’s on Lemmy I’ll search here too. Otherwise if there’s a community I’m missing I could of course create it but I know I’m not very good at that so I just accept the fact that I don’t talk about it online until others do.
I’d like to see more sensible liberals here to offset the extremism of the far-left crowd.
A slow growth would be preferable at the moment. Getting Lemmy to be regularly used by at least 250k people would allow more niche communities to take off.
I do not see a big problem regarding people feeling being drowned out by rising user count. There’s always the possibility of going the way BeeHaw did, to curate the instances you want to federate with, allowing smaller, more isolated nodes to exist to provide safe spaces and to avoid context collapse .
Depends. I wish there were more normal people here myself. Because I’m not an extremist looking to live in a hugbox and I enjoy diversity. I genuinely take joy in learning other people’s thoughts and perspectives on topics when they are expressed in a peaceful and thoughtful way. But I’m in a minority.
As for needing to ‘grow userbase’. Not really, but if you want more content and more niches you need more users, plain and simple. Most folks here miss there niche communities from reddit.
Agree 100%, but when I mean normies I’m not only referring to people that like football over retro DOS game crt plugins discussion forums.
I mean like people who don’t really engage in that much critical thinking in general and just want to hang out without much thought, like yk, reddit people (ofc not all reddit users are like this, but if you ever tried to have any type of argument you know what I’m talking about, if you even need a refresher on your logical falacies for a class, reddit’s always got your back)
According to that definition, IMO, lemmy is already overwhelmingly normie.
Whenever I see critical discussion here, it gets harassed, reported, and the thread is locked/removed. Because much of the userbase here is incapable of thinking and reacts with utterly hostility towards anything that isn’t part of their far-left dogmatisms about capitalism evil, communism good, etc. Any arguement or evidence that doesn’t support that belief is labeled ‘fallacy’ or ‘propaganda’.
Real. Also: AI bad. If you think that AI is actually useful you’ll be downvoted to hell and below.
That sounds awful, I really hope it’s not a “forever thing”, Idk where I stand when it comes to politics, but I feel it would be stupid to dismiss an ENTIRE ideology and say “nothing inside of this box labeled capitalism/communism will ever be useful”.
I’d like for people to be civil and discuss the virtues of X or Y policies inside an ideology, kinda hate that if you are a leftie you can’t be anti abortion.
Like who decided that? I don’t like the idea of happy-meal-ideologies where if you subscribe to a particular ideology you are opted in to all that’s inside it and its frowned upon for you to deviate from it.
people do. human nature is to be tribal and the tribe is formed based on inherited belief structures. it’s feelings.
university used to be about learning to think and challenging beliefs, but that’s being flushed down the toilet because administrations now want to protect student’s feelings above all else. so now a lot of university grads have gone through 4-6 years of academic training without ever thinking critically about themselves or their beliefs, and most of them seem to now come out with much more rigid belief structure than they went in with (radicalized).
If I was charging as much as private unis charge per student I’d try my hardest to protect their feelings too lol
You’re asking this on .world, the normie instance. .world is the watered down version of lemmy.
But to answer your question, yes, ideally all people should move to foss versions of corpo software, if only to devalue digital data trading and advertisement space. Yes that means more instances going further right wing, and some instances choosing to no longer federate with the larger, more ‘normie’ ones; but the overall good to society is worth the cost.
How can an instance be “watered down” if most of them federate? Does world block a lot of other instances?
While .world does tend to block a lot of instances, watering down would in this case be a problem with over-federation. .world tends to host the most popular communities, which then is a self-feeding cycle that increasingly centralizes user share on .world, which then produces more content than native communities, then making .world communities more popular, and so on.
It produces much more average (to American and Euro-centric tastes) posts, while also being the defacto instance/community for a particular topic. Watering down what could be much more specialized topic posting and discussions.
With a user base so small as Lemmy has right now you kind of have to bunch up together to try and get some interaction going, as you grow, you can afford to spread out more.
No use in being in a cool super niche Lemmy instance/community if it has like 50 monthtly users and one post every 2 months (you can argue it MIGHT be worth it, but what I’m trying to say is that it’s better for a community to be big enough, as for it to have daily if not hourly posts and MORE interactivity than the other way around)
No one is begging IRC to take over discord but people still use it and it will never go away. Not everything has to be the most popular thing. I joined the fediverse over a decade ago and never left. It has only gotten more and more popular.
Sure, I think Lemmy could have an instance or two for the normies.
And then a dozen or so for the weirdos.Weirdos are fine if they keep to themselves, but the issue they don’t and won’t.
You can’t have any discussion of anything on lemmy without insane people chiming in and trying to derail the conversation by making it all about themselves, and injecting their violent rhetoric into it. I’ve seen many peaceful threads in lemmy get ruined a few hours later by an influx of the virtue signalling nutbags on here who feel compelled to harass and insult anyone or any viewpoint they deem morally impure. And it sucks to be around folks who are only online to get high on their own supply and have nothing of substance to contribute to any conversation other than how much better they are than other people.
Then ask your admins to defederate with wierdo instances. The dbzero admins have a track record of being open about defederation and being open to user opinion.
You can’t have any discussion of anything on lemmy without insane people chiming in and trying to derail the conversation by making it all about themselves, and injecting their violent rhetoric into it.
That is anywhere you go. Not just Lemmy.
I’m not sure if I’m a normie or weirdo here. Like I enjoyed the internet when it was just a bunch of tech nerds sharing their geekery with one another. And I hate that now it’s full of morons who inundate the rest of us with their love of sportball and reality tv and fucking mundanity. But also there are weirdos here that I want nothing to do with. So this all strikes me as very perspective-dependent.
og internet rocked, forums and IRC, I was a loser with no friends at school, but online I found my people, nowdays everyone is online and this is kinda gone (at least in mainstream social media apps)
But it might be a matter of organizing people into different “servers”, my only worry is this being a thing that could be hard, so it’s kinda better to only invite “selected people”, meaning online friends you feel would be a good fit for the community.
Because it is. What’s normal for me isn’t for you.
I don’t see anyone on here going on about sportsball or TV shows. But reddit became like that for sure.
I’m an evil normie here because I own a Nintendo Switch and enjoy it, rather than pirating all my games on my $5000 linux gaming PC, which seems to be the ‘norm’ for lemmy gamers.
Let’s all pretend that Lemmy.ml and Hexbear are for normies, then we will have some peace.
In general yeah. I love all the conversations I have IRL I just wish those randos were here for more consistent exchanges of ideas
Yep.
There will just be more and larger communities. Many of them will just be tech-focused, and the discussions will move there.
