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 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.
Sorry to get to your message this late, for some reason I missed this notification, yes, my account it less than a week old, (Ad Hominem, I don’t think the age of my account has anything to do with whatever I say, you should engage with what I’m saying instead of going after my personal characteristics like how old my account is)
I’m trying to find the place in my post where I opened a discussion about changing anything, and I don’t seem to be able to find the spot, so please let me know if I’m missing anything. I said I’m enjoying Lemmy, what I PERSONALLY would like to happen to Lemmy, then questions to try and learn from more seasoned users in the site about what they thing the site should be like, if it should grow or not, and what types of people if any should we try not to include.
I don’t see any place where a fixed position is set like: “We ought to do X”, I just see questions for both sides of the argument in the post I sent, for Lemmy to grow/Stay on the smaller side etc…
But please let me know if there’s anything wrong or off about what I said, without using a logical fallacy. If I have, I have no issues retracting/revising what I said/apologizing.
“I don’t think the previous social network of my account has anything to do with whatever I say, you should engage with what I’m saying instead of going after my personal characteristics like which network I’m coming from.”
I mean, yes? This statement as well, and this can be expanded to any variation of it that makes a judgment based on a personal characteristic instead of engaging with the argument, it’s basic logic.
There are two options, either you don’t know logic, or you do, and therefore you are aware you are engaging in a logical fallacy of your own, basically being an asshole for kicks.
Something to get the blood pumping. I am waiting for when the niche communities come alive.
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.
Lemmy on desktop, any browser, is so broken for me I’d never advise someone to try it. I assume the phone versions are better, but I’m wholly ignorant there. In any case, if they can’t get a simple web interface to function, on a large instance like .world, it’s broken.
I should add, not talking about picky shit. One example: I have to mark each post as “read” and refresh to home screen to continue, “next” is broken. Mostly the same for replies.
Well, shit, that sounds really weird.
Are you in a position in which you can take that to Lemmy-World-Help…?
Seems weird. Definitely looks like something worth posting on !support@lemmy.world
advertising Lemmy more over the internet
That’s never going to happen effectively. Advertising campaigns cost money, which is something that open source projects are normally short of
Sorry, I think I made a mistake there, I didn’t mean advertising like running ads, but mouth to mouth, basically yapping about lemmy to a bunch of the people you know/chat to if other social media, like a shotgun approach to see if anyone ends up here after you talk to a ton of people.
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’.
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
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.
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!
I’m perfectly content with letting Lemmy grow organically. If it achieves a wider user base, great, but I’m also fine if it doesn’t. I think any attempts to deliberately make it more palatable to a wider audience should be heavily scrutinized, though. This isn’t to say all changes such an audience would want are bad, or should be denied, but I’ve seen too many sites completely shit on the wants and needs of their existing users in order to have broader appeal, and I would rather avoid that.
Nice take, I can see how that could end up being a problem
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.
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.
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.
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.
Normies flood in growth is exciting for awhile, they drown out and dismantle out the core group by sheer volume, they take over things start to feel like every other social site, ???, profit, corpo takeover, enshitification, decline.
Hopefully Lemmy is built different enough to break this process, but so was everything else until it made someone money.
I’d like to see more sensible liberals here to offset the extremism of the far-left crowd.
as long as we have enough options to curate our feeds it should be fine.
In general yeah. I love all the conversations I have IRL I just wish those randos were here for more consistent exchanges of ideas
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.
