Tbf, i wouldn't recommend Lemmy to anyone i know either for more reasons including this
this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2025
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Examples please?
Yup, that's a problem. Specially because, once the gender ratio gets too skewed towards one side (it is), the Petrie multiplier kicks in; then the sexism targets each woman more and more frequently.
Potential solutions that I see for the problem:
- Perhaps creating a few instances for women? I don't mean instances to talk only about feminism, but for general stuff. With higher standards against harassment.
- Better mod policing against harassment. Collective action, so it's easy to say and hard to do it, I know.
The admins could try banning sexist men, but that'll never happen
The admins of what? There is no singular "admins" of the Fediverse. That's kind of the whole point.
I understood "the admins" as "a meaningfully large amount of the admin teams of the Fediverse". Collective action.
I still don't read it that way, but assuming it is, that is still unreasonable. There are simply too many differing viewpoints, by design. The best option for this sort of thing is to start a female focused instance. It won't be able to affect the wider fediverse directly, but it would be able provide the space that is seemingly absent atm.
I run a few communities that I would consider to be fairly women-oriented, or at least I would expect them to be interested. I do not expect many men to be interested, and hey that's okay. I welcome anyone who wants to, but no harm if it's not your thing.
But any post that gets made gets downvoted to hell. I routinely have to moderate and remove posts of "Why is this here" and "This is stupid" even though there are people who enjoy it, they are just swarmed by other commenters, and it's made my members less active.
It's pretty clear how people vote and act here, I'm coming up on 2 years here and it's been like how you'd expect. Downvotes don't mean "I don't think this adds to the conversation" or "This is appropriate", they mean "I personally don't like this" here, and I think that kills a lot of our smaller communities.
Very disappointing to find out the real reason why women-oriented communities aren't exactly thriving here. But not surprising, I guess, although I was expecting better from a platform that seems so generally left wing. Can't even expect the men here to stomp that shit out. And now I'm waiting for someone to come and respond something along the lines of "not all men" while not addressing or confronting the issue or taking any steps to push for change.
Edit: aren't admins able to see who is downvoting? So basically the admins of your instance are just sitting back and allowing certain people to ruin things for others in communities that don't concern them?
I was devastated from the most recent US election as I learned a similarity between all political views is hating women. On another note, it's been 17 hours and I am immune to sarcasm; NoT aLL mEn
One of my first experiences on Lemmy was a bunch of mens rights activists celebrating a women's tech job fair being overrun by men.
I'm not surprised that this is a problem. Lemmy's main demographic is the tech obsessed, that's always going to be filled with misogynistic neckbeards.
Don't say always.
It's defeatist.
Thanks for the enlightening thread. And that puts a dampener on the enthusiasm that I was feeling for this place. Not that I should be surprised or anything.
I might misunderstand how things work here but it sounds to me like if entire communities are getting bombed by downvotes, then it's the various admins across instances that are allowing this to happen. And it puts a bit of a dark cloud over this place now for me.
Blahaj.zone has disabled downvotes, so at least that part can't be weaponised against folk on our instance.
As for the rest of it, yeah, lemmy is better than reddit, but it did get a lot of users from reddit, so its still closer to reddit culture than I'd like. But, it's also got a lot of better aspects than reddit ever did, and hopefully that trend will continue
Is there anything others can do to help? Feddit.uk wouldn't tolerate this but I'm not sure what a regular user can do apart from look out for harassment, call it out and report promptly
Not good. We need Lemmy and the fediverse represent all people as a whole if er hope to become the standard backbone of internet communication.
Back when I used Reddit, one of my favorite subs was TrollX. If we had a sub with that spirit, it would be a good start.
Are there secret communities on Lemmy? Not that secret communities should be a default, but I was invited to a secret sub on Reddit years ago that was all women. It was a true safe space from harrassment, where we could talk about feminine things that we knew wouldn’t gain traction in main subs. I have no idea how it started, but I knew that users who were invited to join had previously been vetted by the sub’s mods - they saw that I’d made feminist posts and multiple comments about being a woman, and didn’t go around picking fights. It was like a background check.
I don’t believe there is any one solution, but starting with dedicated communities (in the spirit of TrollX), with mods that smack down misogyny and (actual) trolls, sounds like the best way to start.
Let's get away from the "X chromosome" bit now that we're not stuck with Reddit's bad names
It doesn’t need to be called the same thing.
I’m also not sure if it matters, but Troll X and Two X Chromosomes were very different subs. Troll X was more of a spin-off, and was never strictly for XX women - it was trans-inclusive by default. That’s what I’m hoping for here too.
It seems to be one of the problems where Lemmy feeling a bit like old Reddit is really, really bad. Remembering from back then, it took many years of concerted effort and dedicated subreddits attacking sexism (that were in turn harassed and hated on by the "mainstream" Reddit audience, like SRS for example) to slowly change the culture. And it's not like Reddit is some sort of safe haven even now.
I would moderate it :(
You don't need to ask anyone's permission to create a Lemmy community.
relevant discussions:
- !lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world true colors: https://lemmy.cafe/post/10574267
- incredible find: https://lemmy.cafe/post/10217719
- epic ratio: https://lemmy.cafe/post/9597634
- lemmy is a worse platform for women than reddit was: https://lemmy.cafe/post/4821164
this issue of such a massive proportion can only be solved with intention—it’s not getting fixed by accident. recognizing the problem is the first step.
I'm not quiet about being a woman, but have yet to receive dms or inappropriate responses or dismissals due to that fact (via lemmy).
EDIT: although elsewhere in this post's comment section I just received such a dismissal by someone who thought I was a man. Indeed, this is the direction in gender space along which I am used to experiencing such behavior, and it is why I have chosen to emphasize the fact that I am a female with a vagina so much in recent years: to get women to stop harassing me.
So I'll shout it out here: I'm a woman, if anyone has a problem with that or just wants to talk about it, please reach out.
I want to help solve the problem but I need to see it better first. I only ever see cherry-picked examples like you have collected here instead of seeing it in the wild. Don't get me wrong, the cherry-picked examples are bad, but I need more than a handful of outliers to really understand the problem and where it comes from before I can understand what I can do to help.
I am a male with a penis but it is a very feminine penis and I stand in solidarity with your vagina. In fact,. Ny.penis' name is Cassandra, which is neither here nor there but it is indeed a fact.
Being serious for a moment though: I agree with your rational approach here. I have found Lemmy to be more hostile than reddit overall, and while I condemn hostility based on gender or race (I very much applaud hostility based on religion though) I think we NEED THIS SO FUCKING BADLY.
The entire internet has become a bland cesspool of meaningless garbage. I think the current state of things has proven that what inevitably begins as a laudable attempt to stomp out hhate speech (which I condemn) the window invariably gets wider and wider until meaningful dialogue is silenced.
We should be very fucking hostile towards Nazis. We should be hostile towards avaricious governments and unchecked human greed. We should be hostile towards proselytization, and anyone that cant understand that freedom FROM religion is as, or more important than, freedom OF religion. And while I can see the need to ban outright calls for violence as being necessary, the ubiquity of iron-clad moderation makes me very concerned about what will happen when there is a legitimate need to react against violent acts from entrenched power systems towards the oppressed.
While the comments here about "go make your own instance" are dismissive, I do agree with then in spirit. I want to participate in communities that eschew group think and promote real dialoguue. Especially dialogue I don't agree with.
The power of the fediverse is that if someone wants to copy the bland corporate safe space that is the rest of the internet there is fuck all stopping them.
wait, what? we have women in here? where?
I do get the joke; Even so, to this post's credit, that this comment [at time of writing] is +3 is a great representation of their challenges.
The whole point is about people feeling legitimate using the platform. Jokes feeding on the trope "there aren't women on the Internet" reinforces alienation. It makes sense they wouldn't feel comfortable if dismissal is the community upvoted response to them -already- feeling unwelcome.