TThor

It is a weird realization to understand that some people don’t understand empathy for their fellow man. In many cases not simply don’t have empathy, but don’t understand it, like it is actually a foreign concept for them.

We see this when examining many dictators like Putin, that his entire view of international politics is shaped by this mindset that civilians are disposable pawns to be thrown away at the pleasure of those above them, and keeps making faulty assumptions of how other people will act based on this. The important takeaway I think is that when people immerse themselves deep enough in such cruel thinking, the cruelty eventually becomes second nature.

This is the most confusing thing as a new user, and honestly might prove to be a real barrier to gaining additional users: Lemmy is confusing.

Reddit was simple: reddit is reddit, and then you have subcommunities in reddit, and that’s it. But Lemmy/Fediverse/kbin/mastodon/beehive/whatever term is being used, it gets really confusing in what the service im actually on even is or how it relates to these other services. Like, I’m currently talking through kbin.social/, but I don’t even know fully where I am or how kbin relates to all these other things exactly. Is Kbin just some sort of chat container for using lemmy instances, is it a lemmy instance itself, is it a specific group of instances, etc, I don’t clearly know.

On top of that, Voat got their main population-spike around the time reddit was cracking down on racist and extremist subreddits, so those are the type of users who shaped the culture of Voat. Lemmy, on the other hand, is getting their population spike from enthusiast users, I.E. the 10% of people most responsible for voting, commenting, posting, and just in general contributing to the site. Therefore, those are the people shaping the growing culture of Lemmy, doing so in a mostly positive way.

There is a phenomenon known as the “Eternal September”. In the earliest internet, the vast majority of internet users were college student. Therefore, every September when freshmen started school, the online communities would get a massive influx of new users; These new users were often poorly behaved or disruptive to the culture of the communities, but over time they would acclimate to the local culture and become just more normal users, and things would settle back to normal. This was known as the “September Effect”.

And then one year the internet started gaining small mainstream attention, and suddenly these chatrooms were being constantly flooded with new, ill-behaved users all the time; And because this “September” never ended, the culture of these communities ended up being washed away by the new people, and irreversibly changed forever; hence the “Eternal September”.

The moral of the story, too many new people to a community too fast can overrun the existing cultural dynamic, and so either you need to be restrained in how quickly you let new people join so they can gradually assimilate, or you need the people joining to already share the same culture you desire.