How many people is too many? 👪

A while ago, I watched some introductory stuff about geocaching. It warned people to be careful around "muggles", meaning people who don't know about geocaching. As someone who'd never done it before, I was about to change from a muggle to an insider; someone in the know. It felt strange to enter a group without knowing or meeting anyone else who was in it. Was I really changing? Should *I* start to use condescending terms for outsiders?

Today I read marginalia's post about "normies". It's not a word I knew, but it seems like the same idea. And it's related to the distate for newbies and the concept of eternal September. All those new people turning up and spoiling things!

Why do we feel this way about outsiders? I remember hearing that humans developed to cope with relating to up to 150 people [citation needed]. At that level you can keep track of who's who. It feels manageable. But more than that and you can't keep track of individuals. You start to think of people as groups. And you try to find some subset that you belong to so that you keep the number below 150. And you treat everyone else as an outsider.

Now on line, there are billions of people. So you find a niche. For example, I was user 16 thousand or so on LiveJournal, and I thought that I had arrived too late. Then it seemed crazy when it got to hundreds of thousands, and eventually millions. But social networks are a success because although there are huge numbers of people, you can limit your interactions to the people you've friended.

Geminispace still feels like a very manageable place. But (if it doesn't disappear) it will end up not as a single space, but as a collection of niches. And that's ok, and we don't havr to be condescending about outsiders or incomers.

Marginalia: A brief hypothesis about "normies"

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