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)
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.
I don’t know why anyone uses apps for any of this. It’s literally just websites. Not to yuck in anyone.
I used an app back in the reddit days but I find lemmy doesn’t have all the cruft that I hate, so I just use the default web UI.
Being comfortable with websites is a very western thing (and I guess that is also a minority in smartphones). In countries like India, a huge majority of the people’s first personal computer was a smartphone. They either use the google app to browse the web or use other apps. No one bothers to use a web browser. It is still the case today. A lot of people don’t use a desktop here.
Interesting, I had no idea. I use my browser on my phone. Actually even when I was using a 10 year old phone, I found I had to use browser for everything because no apps would support my old Android OS.
To me the browser always seemed the more accessible option, but I’m used to using a browser from desktop it’s true.