(Content warning, discussions of SA and misogyny, mods I might mention politics a bit but I hope this can be taken outside the context of politics and understood as a discussion of basic human decency)
We all know how awful Reddit was when a user mentioned their gender. Immediate harassment, DMs, etc. It’s probably improved over the years? But still awful.
Until recently, Lemmy was the most progressive and supportive of basic human dignity of communities I had ever followed. I have always known this was a majority male platform, but I have been relatively pleased to see that positive expressions of masculinity have won out.
All of that changed with the recent “bear vs man” debacle. I saw women get shouted down just for expressing their stories of being sexually abused, repeatedly harassed, dogpiled, and brigaded with downvotes. Some of them held their ground, for which I am proud of them, but others I saw driven to delete their entire accounts, presumably not to return.
And I get it. The bear thing is controversial; we can all agree on this. But that should never have resulted in this level of toxicity!
I am hoping by making this post I can kind of bring awareness to this weakness, so that we can learn and grow as a community. We need to hold one another accountable for this, or the gender gap on this site is just going to get worse.
i’m just a little disappointed woman seem to consistently be a minority here
I wonder why this is? (Serious) Tiktok has significantly more female users than male… Maybe it’s a format thing?
Barrier to entry, with tech still being male dominated
i still wonder why that is when sites like lemmy and reddit are just as open to everyone as tiktok.
is this about staying away from the hateful reddit nerds?
Lemmy is moderated by several power mods just as Reddit was, and they are male. There is no proper space for women on Lemmy.
yeah im already starting to get that feeling, but are they disproportionaly being banned, like what is actually happening?
We just lurk and look at memes and then go socialize elsewhere. It’s not worth the emotional energy to engage with so many males on this platform.
I used to participate in Lemmy after I left Reddit, but migrated to another place. This is one of the rare times I am actually choosing to comment on Lemmy.
Thank you for sharing
is it that bad? is there something that can be done about it?
Report harassing comments. Mods remove harassing comments. Each user can block individuals who are trolls - if they don’t get engagements (positive or negative), their comments won’t float up the feed and they won’t be encouraged to continue being a dick. Validate women’s experiences even if it isn’t your own personal experience. Realize that when you are engaging with women about their personal experiences, it’s not the same as arguing over a topic in tech.
Do you want the moderators to pin your comments on every post and make them glitter? What are they supposed to do? Intrude your social life so you can spend more time on lemmy?
Bye Felicia.
Wdym bye. I apologise for being aggressive. I was not in a good mood then.
lemmy is accessible in the same manner that IRC is, but chances are, unless you’re at least thirty. Or a huge hyper nerd like me, you have no idea what the fuck IRC even is, or don’t know that it isn’t dead.
It’s not about accessibility, it’s about awareness and users.
i bet a few obscure linux packages uses it for support, better than discord.
oh for sure, lots of discussion takes place on IRC channels, basically any prominent application/piece of software has an IRC channel.
But the average person won’t even be aware of it’s existence unfortunately.
most women aren’t internet nerds. sorry to disappoint you.
the ones in my life seem to use the internet almost as much as me.
regardless of that i’d love for lemmy to not be a place just for male internet nerds.
well, then be get ready for it to get as shitty as reddit, as it gets flooded by a diverse set of assholes instead of a select set of assholes who at least don’t take shit too seriously.
i’m sure there will be more assholes in general as it grows, but due to the nature of lemmy, i think its gonna boil down to the specific culture and public of the instance in question.
the unfortunate reality of the tech and IT space in the last twenty years and even up until now. It’s better now, but not great.
The only way to fix it is to simply have more women on the platform unfortunately.