"So to preface this is posted in literature.cafe’s meta community but this question is primarily aimed at generally anyone in the lemmyverse who is NOT a cisgender man no matter what instance they may be in. The purpose of this thread is to present a stage for conversation for those willing to contribute, and although cisgender men are not excluded I kindly ask you to be mindful of the fact what this thread is meant for and try to avoid talking over others here. If you are a cisgender man interested in learning and seeing how lemmy can improve like I am: welcome. For those who are here to cause issues or talk over others though, you will be promptly removed.

I do not know the demographic data of lemmy, but I would wager a large portion are male. And over the past few weeks I have witnessed women on numerous occasion discuss their discomfort on here. Reddit very much had a very “bro-y” feeling culture for many, that felt like a barrier to entry to many women. With lemmy, there’s a potential to break this. But the answer really is how? Lemmy has begun to develop into its own culture already independent of Reddit quite rapidly, and it’s been awesome to see but I am wondering if there’s a way we can push it a step further and implement ways to make the platform more welcoming to women than Reddit previously did.

Thoughts?"

  • kristina [she/her]
    ·
    1 year ago

    ive called them out on it before, no response but i know they read it lmao shrug-outta-hecks

    • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]
      ·
      1 year ago

      They tried to pull "but not all languages have gendered third person pronouns" as if the vast majority of people using Lemmy aren't just English speakers or some other European PIE language like German or Spanish.

      Using this, not an expert on most of these languages, but from what I could gleam on Wikipedia:

      • Mandarin Chinese: Spoken language has no gendered pronouns, but written personal pronouns have gender, mostly due to Western imperialism

      • Spanish: Gendered pronouns

      • English: Gendered pronouns

      • Hindi: No gender pronouns. The language technically doesn't have third person pronouns.

      • Portuguese: Gendered pronouns

      • Bengali: No gendered pronouns

      • Russian: Gendered pronouns

      • Japanese: Gendered pronouns

      • Yue Chinese: No gendered pronouns, but people usually type with Mandarin characters instead of Cantonese characters

      • Vietnamese: No gendered pronouns

      • Turkish: No gendered pronouns

      • Wu Chinese: Same deal with Cantonese

      • Marathi: Gendered pronouns

      • Telugu: Gendered pronouns

      • Korean: Gendered pronouns although spoken pronouns are gender neutral like Mandarin

      • French: Gendered pronouns

      • Tamil: Gendered pronouns

      • Egyptian Spoken Arabic: I have no idea why Wikipedia doesn't lump Arabic together, but Standard Arabic has gendered pronouns

      • Standard German: Gendered pronouns

      • Urdu: No gender pronouns. The language technically doesn't have third person pronouns.

      The major non-PIE European languages (Basque, Estonian, Hungarian, Finnish) don't have gendered pronouns. Outside of Estonians and that's mostly because of the admin of lemm.ee, how many Hungarian/Hindu/Vietnamese/Turkish people actually use Lemmy? It's a ridiculous excuse, and there's no reason why an instance based on a language without gendered pronouns couldn't reuse the pronoun flair as some other type of flair like location.

      • silent_water [she/her]
        ·
        1 year ago

        if lemmy takes off in India, Hindi is more of a concern, but they could literally turn the feature off if the user/instance's primary language was set to one of the mentioned languages.

      • kristina [she/her]
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        Also trans spaces in Chinese have people refer to themselves as aunts, uncles or (based) comrades

        I assume there are other ways they handle it in languages like Finnish

    • BolsheWitch [she/her, they/them]
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      sounds about right. they have a guaranteed way to piss off & deter fascists, but they’re ignoring because?? pitiful behavior from otherwise competent men.

      again, i like both of them, i just think they’re being stubborn and arrogant. no idea if our admins have pushed them on this at all, but i can’t imagine they haven’t advocated for it.

      ! niko-concern

      • Awoo [she/her]
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        Just have it as a fucking option. The servers that enable it vs the servers that do not enable it would be an incredibly useful tool of judgement lmao.