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Do we really want Lemmy's userbase to grow and assimilate "normies"? (lemmy.world)
submitted 12 hours ago by to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world
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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)

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[–] 54 points 11 hours ago (8 children)

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.

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  • [–] 14 points 9 hours ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 2 hours ago

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 10 hours ago (4 children)

    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?

    @slayersfan@lemmy.world

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  • [–] [S] 0 points 9 hours ago (3 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 5 points 9 hours ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 hours ago (1 child)

    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.

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