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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you hand made this one rn you are a pretty cool guy, but if you had it saved up and ready to use you’re based.
fuck yeah!
If I could get on a upvote loan to upvote it twice I would, this is sick haha
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.
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.
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.
What do you mean “normies”? Trying to start a cult, scene kid?
In general yeah. I love all the conversations I have IRL I just wish those randos were here for more consistent exchanges of ideas
Nah, I talk to the public for a living. Give me a the high-effort weirdos here, please.
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
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 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
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.
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.
