I saw this post from !twoxchromosomes@slrpnk.net, and I wanted to share it here to get more discussion because it is important. I’m hoping that this post won’t crowd out any voices, and while I’ve tried to keep this post productive and inclusive, please call out any concerns and use the post if you prefer :)
The post I linked had concerns about increasing misogyny and sexism, how there are fewer women on Lemmy, and how that might be a part of the problem.
Before I start, for those that don’t want to hear u/otter ramble again, some communities that you should could join and participate in:
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Communities related to Women
Communities related to Men
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There are also communities like !feminism@beehaw.org and !mensliberation@lemmy.ca, and you can find more areas I didn’t think about on lemmyverse.net.
So one thing I wanted to comment was that there may be more women on here than you might think! Lemmy is anonymous, and the issue of low activity affects the men oriented communities the same way as the women oriented ones. By participating in the communities above, we can make that more apparent (ex. Mastodon has a pretty nice blend of people).
By saying this, I don’t want to ignore legitimate concerns, but rather it’s because I find statements like “this platform doesn’t have X group” discourages X group from participating.
Now, in order to make this problem better, I think it might help to highlight the benefits and work on the risks:
Benefits to highlight
- Backups: Lemmy allows for an official backup of existing communities for women. If the Reddit one is shut down (it DOES happen), the Lemmy one would be available for regrouping
- Inclusive: Lots of people left Reddit for privacy/ads/accessibility reasons, including women. Everyone deserves a space
- Empowering: The Fediverse makes it easy to run an instance owned, funded, moderated, and operated by women
Risks to work on:
- Doxxing & Deletion: This affects everyone, but it might affect women more/in different ways. When there is something you want to get rid of, say because of doxxing/stalking/creepy behaviour, it’s much harder to do that with federation. Some of this can be fixed by fixing federation, and some of it might come down to crowdsourcing legal help. Past that I don’t know…
- Moderation: This is Lemmy specific. Women-oriented communities attract trolls, as do other community areas, and Lemmy moderation needs work.
Growing communities
- General community building ideas apply here as well
- Trust would help in this case. Getting in touch with existing community moderators on Reddit, and setting up a parallel / sister community setup would encourage people to post here.
- Anything else? :)
I’m a woman, and make no attempt to hide that fact in my posts. That said, I also don’t personally have much interest in talking about being a woman, so don’t sub to any of those places you linked.
Over on Reddit I just sort of let people assume I was male a lot of the time, since it wasn’t really relevant to what we were talking about. But from the start on Lemmy I’ve made sure to call out incorrect assumptions, downvote and give a talking to people stereotyping or being misogynistic, etc etc. And the more of us (of all genders) that make that same decision, the better things get.
I also mod !knitting@lemmy.world which as you might expect is largely although by no means entirely women. Any questionable comments over there are dealt with swiftly, I am absolutely not having it.
I don’t necessarily see it as a “problem” that Lemmy is seemingly male-dominated (I say Lemmy because my Mastodon is very much female-and-NB-dominated). It’s more just a fact of early adopters tending to the techy interests that skew male. But if someone does see it as a problem and wants it to change, there are basically two things to do:
- Make sure you’re helping make Lemmy a welcoming place for non-males
- Invite your non-male friends
All that said, other women may disagree but I don’t particularly feel like a minority on here and never really think about it until coming across something gross (which is a LOT less often than on Reddit, thankfully). There may be few enough women that I recognise their names often when they post, but let’s be honest Lemmy is a small world and that goes for most regular posters in general.
(And it helps that I’m middle-aged so if any little boy thinks they can upset me with comments about my gender or appearance or whatever, lol, the self-confidence of age is a wonderful thing 😉)
Edit: Just wanted to add, if you’re not a man and you’re reading this thinking “wow she’s lucky, I’ve had such a bad experience here” then first, I’m sorry you’ve had that experience, people suck sometimes. But also, drop me a DM let’s see if we’ve got any interests in common and I can maybe signpost you to some more friendly communities and people. Between my two accounts I spend WAY too much time on Lemmy!
You echo my experience to a T. Sometimes people assume I’m a man to hilarious effect, but most of the time it’s a non-issue.
Glad to hear other folks having positive experiences here too! Idk about you but every single time I’ve corrected someone for referring to me as “he” on Lemmy, they’ve actually apologised. Quite the change from Reddit!
It makes me happy to hear that :)
Also, I love seeing posts from !knitting@lemmy.world, I’ve forwarded a few posts from there to friends that knit
Woohoo! Get them over here, December is going to be SOCK MONTH it’s very exciting haha 😄
And Sweater Month too? How delightfully festive of a side hobby, regardless of climate location.
DID YOU KNOW? Knitting isn’t just about cosy socks and sweaters in winter, it’s also a summer-appropriate activity with cotton yarns, lace patterns, cute home accessories and suchlike.
This has been your knitting community fact of the day.
Subscribe.
Yeah I definitely feel like a minority here sometimes but when I compare it to rules of the internet era internet it’s not even close. The misogyny has generally been the sort I’m used to as an engineer. I probably shouldn’t be basing my standards on gamergate era Reddit, but it is way better than that
There are instances to avoid interacting with but generally they’re defederated from a lot of instances because they’re welcoming to conservative assholes.
Make sure you’re helping make Lemmy a welcoming place for non-males
I’d phrase that as “make sure you’re helping make Lemmy a welcoming place for everybody”
Being active in a pretty friendly tech scene in the late 90s/early 00s I’ve seen things being ruined for quite a bunch of people who enjoyed being where nobody was judging them for who they were or wanted to be after a bunch of newly joined women decided to try force a bunch of “women only” policies.
Just don’t be dicks to each other, no matter who’s on the other end. And don’t try to force talking about who you are in places where nobody cares - there are specific groups for that.
Being welcoming to people in general goes without saying. But we’re specifically in a thread about encouraging more women to join and making them feel safe to do so.
Even in this thread I’d rather phrase it explicitly to include everyone - I’ve seen statements like this interpreted by some individuals as “make it welcoming for women at all costs, which may include making it openly hostile for people not meeting my specific definition of woman”, which didn’t have a very pretty end result.
I do appreciate where you’re coming from, there. Some people will unfortunately take any opportunity to exclude others.
“Non-women” is a subset of “everybody”.
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I just want to point out that our fairly optimistic views and plans for Lemmy has very likely specifically attracted trolling attention. We have a target on our backs, because some people just like attacking nice things. Most of the internet is not very nice, so does not need to be attacked. We are trying to do something different though, and that will attract some negative attention whether we like it or not.
Since they want to have a chilling effect on the community, hopefully demotivating some of its userbase, it is necessary to embody a willful refusal to be chilled.
For each of us.
This turns my tendency to Lemmy while wrapped in a cosy electric blanket into a deep metaphor.
Checking in from my couch while wrapped in a soft and warm robe I just got last week - it’s quite cold outside!
Just a thought, communities dedicated to one particular gender are often not inclusive by design, especially if you actively try to funnel people of a certain gender to certain communities. And therefore they, historically, have tended to devolve into echo chambers, and then subsequently into toxic spaces, with little room for nuanced discussion nor hosting a broad range of opinions. That’s not to say all communities are like this and most don’t start out like that either. There is value to have these communities if they themselves promote inclusion. But putting people of a particular gender into a gender-specific community is not at all the solution to “Too few women on Lemmy”.
I’d rather see the focus on making the general communities be welcoming to everyone equally.
I have to agree to disagree.
I often do find myself more likely to talk about gender specific issues when I know that the space I’m in will make an effort to exclude those people who don’t understand that some topics aren’t for them. I have seen, time and again, how any topic focusing on the issues of a specific gender will bring out hordes of people to scream about how this exclusion is somehow evil or wrong just because it excludes them.
Gender specific conversations draw out trolls like nothing else.
Yeah I’m not prone to talk about misogyny in my career field in general spaces for that career, but in spaces for women in it I’m much more comfortable talking about it.
Adding to this, a lot of times these communities forget to be intersectional, so they end up having a racist or terf problem
I getchya but also, you should see what happened to the “men die early” thread on twoX. It’s a LOT of guys complaining, kind of drowning out any women making points and throwing downvotes at them pretty hard.
I’m a woman and I don’t follow any of those communities. I don’t have pronouns on my profile so people probably assume I’m a dude. I have seen misogyny called out pretty much everytime, so lemmy is in a pretty good place already imo.
Same here, these subs just aren’t the reason why I used to be on reddit or why I’m on lemmy now. I used to be low profile on reddit (and actually liked when people thought I was the allo-cis-het man they assumed me to be because it made my posts look so funny at times), but I’ve found lemmy to be less misogynistic so far and I’ve seen a fair amount of users with pronouns and fairly filled out profiles so I thought I’d give mine a try too. So far nobody has ever used them, but we’ll see.
This isn’t meant to bash OP’s cause, I’m sure someone finds these communities useful, it’s just not for me.
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That’s cool to hear!
Would you be able to share more on the safety related stuff that came up? I’m curious mostly
I’ll check out the other thread :)
There is a certain amount of scientific evidence that shows that on average women are more fearful and have more anxiety then men (While having on average other positive traits more then men).
Allowing users to block users from certain instance might help with that.
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Brainworms.
Why ?
I see comments, and sometimes people behind them. If i see an asshole i respond appropriately, if i care enough. I do not see what 2xc sees, troublesome levels of misogyny and sexism. Whatever the reason for my view is. And i sure do not see gender on teh internets.
I get why those all comunities exist, and that there are topics/interests specific to genders. I am asking what do you think what you are suggesting will accomplish.
I do not see what growing those comunities will do about the insinuated problem. But hey, you all can do whatever you want.
Just a small warning if/when you go to a bigger scale: men are people too. Yes, even the assholes. Not that women don’t have those. Sexism does go bout ways and has many causes.
