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)
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