Ask Lemmy

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'd take "normies" any day over people who classify others as "normies".

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'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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Yes, I want to build up an alternative to big tech controlled social media so working class people can have our own voices magnified.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Nah, I talk to the public for a living. Give me a the high-effort weirdos here, please.

Sure, I think Lemmy could have an instance or two for the normies.
And then a dozen or so for the weirdos.

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.

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.

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 want everybody to be included and to come together in unity. We should try that at least once during the course of human history. Oh how the elite just shuddered right now.

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 .

the nature of lemmy means there can be indiscriminate growth without the inherent issues that come with it. The real issue is that should lemmy grow really big, corporations will become interested. Maybe they see it as something to colonize and try to claim, maybe they see it as threat if they cant control it.

That is what we need to be ready for, not the people that are unwittingly being oppressed by those corporations.

The call is coming from inside the house my guy.

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.