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.
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.
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 differ a bit compared to you there, I don’t want to ruin my online experience and entertainment for an uncertain future possibility of the thing i wanna do or talk about will come up on Lemmy, what if I need to wait 5 whole years before it appears here? Or more? I don’t wanna be bored for 5 years.
If the alternative starts to appear in Lemmy I’ll try to comment/post on it and be active, and if it grows enough I then will probably drop reddit, but before that, I’d rather have my cake and eat it too.
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’.
Bluesky is quite a bit better on that bit. Often said over there that lemmy is painfully insular. For example, a person asked an honest question about transexuality yesterday and got both buried in downvotes and got a couple of great answers. This place has led me to believe trans people and their supporters are bastards constantly looking to fight over any imagined trans(heh)gression. I know that’s not true, no one lecture me, but goddamn some these people are hard to get along with.
OTOH, people on BS never read past the headline they’re reacting to. It’s fucking weird having went there from here where we’re critical bastards who dig a bit into the post before spouting off. Critical thinking is an expectation (on some topics).
Made this for lemmy last year:
Dude today said using hours and minutes is a capitalist invention we never needed. Wasn’t sure he was joking, yep, dead serious. Same dude also told me he’s met some smart frogs. 🙄 Y’all, I’ve kept frogs and have a Pac Man right now. He’s pretty much mindless, just waiting to ambush prey 24/7.
Perhaps what’s most bizarre is people living in an oligarchy calling it capitalism, stumping for socialism, yet none can agree on what any of those terms mean. (For the record, I want Bernie Sander’s style democratic socialism. Bit of a misnomer for me, whatever, it’s where countries and cities are finding success, and I don’t argue with success.)
nah i am also pretty much a bernie type, but on lemmy that means you hate trans people. many folks on here are just looking to be offended by anyone who doesn’t agree with whatever insane belief they have they think makes them special and smarter than other folks, even if it’s totally delusional and dumb.
the good news is the nutbags mostly live on a few instances and if you block them then you don’t have to see their insanity. you will still get some of it, but you won’t get blasted about how you hate trans people when you point out 99% of the population isn’t trans or that catering to the trans extremists who think male/female is a ‘social construction’ that doesn’t exist. I have had weirdos on here literally argue with me that the fact hermaphroditic worms exist means human beings are ‘naturally hermaphroditic’. then when asked if we should reproduce asexually like bacteria they lost it on me and started telling me how I am just a hateful bigot.
Can we block entire instances? I hesitate to block because I don’t want to carve out my own echo chamber. Disagreed with a dude yesterday and was told he was merciful in not blocking me the first time, BYE. We got some real snowflakes around here. /r/conservative is about the only worse place for melters. :)
Yes, it’s in your block list. You have to add them manually.
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.
happy-meal-ideologies
I very much like that. Been told a dozen times, here and elsewhere that I can’t be a leftist because I believe $X. Yeah, that’s gonna bring people into the tent.
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.
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.
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.
.world has the same userbase as the other instances except they’re center-left instead of far-left. And that’s not sufficient to make them into normies.
Lemmy, taken as a whole, is not a pigeon on the radar of “good to society”. If this place disappeared tomorrow, everyone would ask, “What the fuck is a lemmy?”
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.
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.
A rising tide lifts all ships. A larger userbase doesn’t just mean “normies”, it means a wider variety of demographics, fandoms, and views.
And that in turn means that somewhere in the large userbase will be more people who match my freak. The main thing I used Reddit for was niche hobbies and fandoms, but over here I suspect I might be the only person on this platform who’s into my specific hyperfixations. If the userbase was large enough, there might be a chance to try and establish communities for some of those things.
But perhaps most importantly, I want this place to grow to prove that alternatives to the corporate social media platforms can succeed. And in order to do that, we do need “normies”, we need to pull them away from those corporate platforms.
Fair point, might invite a few more people then!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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’d still like to see the user base more diverse, but I’d be happy to stay if it’s just linux geeks.
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.
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.
Yep.
There will just be more and larger communities. Many of them will just be tech-focused, and the discussions will move 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
Yep. Most folks are like this.
I think a lot of lemmy users vastly project themselves as normative, when they are not. I do a lot of things that most people freak out when they find out because it’s so far outside of their comfort zone. I’ve studied 6 languages, for example. I think it’s fun, most normal folks took high school Spanish and think studying a language is stupid and boring.
They also often become hostile over this difference. People generally hate academics and eggheads, because they perceive their expertise and passion as stupid because it has no immediate benefit or interest to them, and their impulse is always ‘if you are so smart why aren’t you using that intelligence and passion to make more money’.
Cool. I live the most educated city in the USA by many standards.
Most people who live here are educated nominally, but they are mostly passionate about TV shows and sports, or their uninformed political opinions. And even with the high level of education, 45%, or about 1 in 2 people, don’t hold a college degree.
Where are all these ‘experts’ you claim exist? I don’t ever see them even in my own city. Now if I go the MFA, yeah I am much more likely to meet someone who has a passion/expertise for art, but the majority of folks that go there are not experts or passionate, they are just doing there for a ‘thing to do’ or they are a tourist.
If I want to find experts on topics, you go to podcasts or youtubes or read books. You don’t talk to people on the street. My barista isn’t going to want to talk about the Dutch East India Company, the are going to want to talk about the Patriots game today. They probably have a BA or a MA even, but they probably aren’t interested in talking about what they studied because to them college was just a thing they had to do because someone told them to do it and they just went through the motions of their education rather than had any passion or dedicated interest in their studies.
I am not even making this up. Many people I have known here over the years have little to no interest in anything other than what is immediately application to their job or what they do for entertainment. I’ve met dozens of dozens of PhDs who don’t have any passion or interest in their own work, other than the money it brings them to go travel or go to restaurants, and they only do those things based on what is trending on IG. They have no interest in Greek history, but they saw the pretty picture of the island with the white houses and they want to go to Greece now so they can also take the same selfie. And if I talk about Greek history in terms of my own interest of that topic, or that I studied Attic Greek for two years, I’m a straight up weirdo freak to them and they usually start in with the passive aggressive insults about why I ‘would waste my time on useless stupid things like that’.
I also grew up in a small rural town, where nobody was educated, and well, it was leagues leagues worse there. The only ‘expertise’ anyone had was again, focused on TV sports or Top20 pop music. Nobody I knew back then had any expertise or knowledge of anything outside of basic blue collar jobs that they mostly hated and resented.
I especially remember halfway through graduate school, when I learned most of my cohort and most of my professors, didn’t even like what they were doing. The image of a professor who has a deep passion for their work… is not most of the academic population. They just did it because ‘they couldn’t they of anything else to do and they got good grades’. They had no passion for their field, they just saw it as the path of least resistance for their lives. I remember my ethics professor telling me his true passion was playing guitar and tennis and he became an academic because his parents were both academics and it was the easiest thing for him to do, he was also utterly shocked that I came from uneducated hill folk and my parents were funding my PhD like his did.
