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.
I don’t understand when people say “normies” this and “normies” that. What makes us any different than when we were on Reddit?
How many people were actually even using Lemmy only before they were using Reddit? I rarely used it before but when they got real shitty, I decided to move here.
So what does that even make me? What creed do I need to follow to be considered not a “normie”?
“Normie” Is a loose definition, but my personal definition would combine a few things:
- Mainstream interests without too much depth (likes what’s trending right now and follows what most people do/like for hobbies, but doesn’t dive deep in any topic)
- Lack of willingness to go out of their way to set things up, no matter how simple they might be, they just rather have something that requires 0 effort/thought.
- Lack of critical thinking skills (Debating usually but not always, ends up in “I FEEL this way therefore it’s right”, tons of logical fallacies, and then they get angry if you point those out, arguing for them its more about being loud/disrespecting the other person than using sound logic)
I find people who are not in this group, usually have some interest in a topic in which they do read on it/dive deeper into it, even if it pisses them off, they can set up things because they understand the value on it, and I feel these types of people (usually) end up being better conversation when it comes to arguing about something, they will try and convince you using some type of logic other than “im right you’re wrong”.
Not a 1to1 with what you’ll probably find in other places when it comes to defining the term, this is just how I personally see it.
Normies are just “not internet people.” It can also be referring to neurotypicals in certain spaces.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Let’s all pretend that Lemmy.ml and Hexbear are for normies, then we will have some peace.
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 slow growth would be preferable at the moment. Getting Lemmy to be regularly used by at least 250k people would allow more niche communities to take off.
I do not see a big problem regarding people feeling being drowned out by rising user count. There’s always the possibility of going the way BeeHaw did, to curate the instances you want to federate with, allowing smaller, more isolated nodes to exist to provide safe spaces and to avoid context collapse .
as long as we have enough options to curate our feeds it should be fine.
Just what do you think you are, mack?
No idea what you might be referring to
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.
A thousand times this! It isn’t the popularity that is the issue, it is the economic model of exploitation.
warm fuzzy words right there, made my night better, hope it pans out well
Reddit doesn’t have voice calls as far as I know, but I haven’t paid close attention.
It doesn’t, but there are reddits for the purpose of finding people to voice chat with using other platforms
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.
If I could get on a upvote loan to upvote it twice I would, this is sick haha
fuck yeah!
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.
What do you mean “normies”? Trying to start a cult, scene kid?
I’m a bit lazy to go and find it rn but I did put my own PERSONAL way of how I understand/use the term in a reply to another comment in this post, not saying I hold the stick of truth over anyone else, and im not trying to enforce any kind of action, I asked cause I like to think about things, and I thought id be better for me to listen to other people’s perspectives before “picking a side” so to speak, I have some preliminary ideas about what I think about the topic but nothing is set in stone really.
The call is coming from inside the house my guy.
