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)
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
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
Nah, I talk to the public for a living. Give me a the high-effort weirdos here, please.
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 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.
The call is coming from inside the house my guy.
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.
I would rather have “normies” then the terminally online divorced from reality late 30 something weirdos with opinions that range from “yikes” to “please keep 100 miles away from a school at all times” users currently making up the majority.
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.
the nature of lemmy means there can be indiscriminate growth without the inherent issues that come with it. The real issue is that should lemmy grow really big, corporations will become interested. Maybe they see it as something to colonize and try to claim, maybe they see it as threat if they cant control it.
That is what we need to be ready for, not the people that are unwittingly being oppressed by those corporations.
Yeah, this scares the shit out of me to be honest, the enshittification seems to end up getting everyone in the end.
I just hope we get to enjoy this for a while, or maybe i’ll be like linux, taking a small chunk out of desktop, a good alternative but not that big that it is constantly threatened (im sure people wanna take linux down, but they would be way more aggressive if linux had 50% of the Desktop share of the market)
If money comes into picture, things get bad always, no exceptions. More money involved, faster it becomes. Donations dont count because its not profit and its not something one can control.
So another thing to prevent lemmy and fediverse from becoming shit is to prevent anyone from profiting off it ever. Enshittification is a symptom of greed that has grown so big it starts to corrode the thing around it, and also pride. Curious how so many things that make world worse tie into the deadly sins.
So big portion of world runs on linux that i dont think it can be taken down. Though maybe some parties might try to control or restrict things for regular people, which is actually why its important linux desktop becomes more widely used for also those who dont know shit about computers. If they dont know anything about linux or if they dont have anything in it for themselves, they can be lied and manipulated easily.
If I may, I’d like to challenge the idea that “regular, everyday people” exist. Most everyone is deeply educated and passionate about something. Tech projects like Lemmy tend to start out by attracting people who are passionate about technology (for obvious reasons). That’s fine and logical, but to lump everyone else into the category of “normies” is to discount the people who couldn’t care less about tech but are instead experts in art, or history, or athletics, or any other dimension of human endeavor. People only become normies when they feel compelled to sand down the sharp edges of their passions in order to better fit in with others who have different passions, even as those others do the same.
I hope that Lemmy never becomes a place for normies, not because people who aren’t into tech get scared away, but because they feel safe and encouraged to be their own special kind of abnormal. Because they will hopefully find others who share their specific passion, but will at the very least find a community that celebrates and encourages passion in all its forms.
Beautiful idea, and while I mostly agree, normies really are a thing, met quite a few people in my life that live shallow lives with surface level interests, people who just go with the flow of what most other people are doing, wearing, listening to, or playing at the time, and they are totally content with such a life.
Yes they might like football or music or games a lil bit, but just the surface super popular stuff, they don’t really care about investing too much time into a hobby and might prefer to just watch tiktoks for 3 hours
