I saw this post from [email protected], 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 [email protected] and [email protected], 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’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.
“Non-women” is a subset of “everybody”.
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.