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Do we really want Lemmy's userbase to grow and assimilate "normies"? (lemmy.world)
submitted 11 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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[–] 5 points 6 hours ago* (4 children)

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.

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  • [–] [S] 4 points 6 hours ago (3 children)

    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

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  • [–] 3 points 6 hours ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 6 hours ago (1 child)

    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

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