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 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
I think there are some similarities, but also some differences.
Lemmy will probably eventually attract the normies of which you speak. And that’s not a bad thing. Bad things happen when low quality content and ad farming are prioritized. The nature of sharing culture, information, and entertainment will always attract new audience.
Because communities here aren’t being monetized by corporate ownership, and because you can selectively add or block instances that don’t meet community standards, I don’t think Lemmy will fall prey to the same enshitifcation that slowly ruined reddit.
warm fuzzy words right there, made my night better, hope it pans out well
A thousand times this! It isn’t the popularity that is the issue, it is the economic model of exploitation.
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
In general yeah. I love all the conversations I have IRL I just wish those randos were here for more consistent exchanges of ideas
Lemmy already has all the issues that Big Social Media has except the profit and monetization drive expectation by a commercial management team. Bad mods, bots, whatever. The difference is that we’re still small enough via instances that it is possible to segregate truly problematic instances or users by other users or instance operators. So in that way we have an advantage, and IMO unless there are some dramatic changes in how the fediverse operates I think it makes it unattractive to the people seeking to commercialize and/or manipulate Social Media. While it’s not impossible for those changes, it’s just unlikely.
No.
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.
