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?

"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?"

    • UlyssesT [he/him]
      ·
      10 months ago

      I think the hexbears have the right idea with pronouns, which is why I've adopted the practice for my handle. Seems like one of the problems with bro culture is an assumption everyone is male until proven otherwise, so this undercuts it.

      I think that's an excellent answer and really would help across federated sectors if it were implemented, "nonpolitical" tears about it or not.

      • thelastaxolotl [he/him]
        ·
        10 months ago

        you have to go to settings by clicking on you account and manually change your name to add your pronouns

      • Freeanotherday [he/him, they/them]
        ·
        10 months ago

        I think it's only works on hexbear accounts ATM.

        Maybe get a hold of one of your admins. I am sure our nerds would be willing to help add them to your instance, If they are interested.

        • VHS [he/him]
          ·
          10 months ago

          i think it depends if your instance will let you change your Display Name. on many instances you can change it freely, on hexbear it's always just your username with your pronouns appended to it. not sure about the startrek site

        • comrade_pibb [comrade/them]
          ·
          10 months ago

          Hexbear uses the display name setting to add pronouns to your username. Other instances you have to do it manually

  • HornyOnMain
    ·
    10 months ago

    "Thanks for stating that I’m, as a cis male, am not excluded. Although I must say that I don’t feel very welcome here."

    stalin-gun-1

  • silent_water [she/her]
    ·
    10 months ago

    fearless, ruthless moderation - tone-policing and concern trolling deserve the axe. it's good to ban overtly abusive stuff but the site culture gets extremely toxic if shitty behavior is allowed to be couched behind 'just asking questions' and the like. also, cishet dudes drooling over sexualized images of women drives us away. hexbears answer for this is the volcel police meme - it has its problems as it's also easily deployed against people who aren't cishet men, but it does serious work in keeping the site welcoming to women.

    • BolsheWitch [she/her, they/them]
      ·
      10 months ago

      i do love that the mods here ban sealions and debate bros. it’s hilarious seeing one of them purged in the mod log lol

    • skeletorsass [she/her]
      ·
      10 months ago

      Yes. I will leave a culture which is dismissive or unfriendly or perverted. Life has enough of that. A culture which is respectful and friendly and will not tolerate perverted people makes me feel safe.

      Even without harrassment Reddit is a very negative place. You can not be wrong or not know the information. It is not a nice place.

    • VOLCEL_POLICE [it/its]B
      ·
      10 months ago

      Show

      The VOLCEL POLICE are on the scene! PLEASE KEEP YOUR VITAL ESSENCES TO YOURSELVES AT ALL TIMES.

      نحن شرطة VolCel.بناءا على تعليمات الهيئة لترويج لألعاب الفيديو و النهي عن الجنس نرجوا الإبتعاد عن أي أفكار جنسية و الحفاظ على حيواناتكم المنويَّة حتى يوم الحساب. اتقوا الله، إنك لا تراه لكنه يراك.

      volcel-police

    • TawnyFroggy [she/her]
      ·
      10 months ago

      Yep. Same way you keep fascism out of a place. Zero tolerance, no second chances.

  • kristina [she/her]
    ·
    10 months ago

    the safest place for women on the fediverse is on hexbear without doubt. and its because the mods enforce nsfw tags and removals of posts that feature violence against women and carte blanche ban people who are harassing.

    i feel like lemmy isnt developing fast enough to meet demands on the infrastructure. there needs to be a lot of safety tools added. tags for posts and being able to hide certain tags (so a bit like post flairs on reddit), DM settings where you have to 'friend' someone before you receive messages in order to avoid dick pics, etc. frankly i think the devs are chuddy for not adding pronouns from hexbear's fork

    • BolsheWitch [she/her, they/them]
      ·
      10 months ago

      frankly i think the devs are chuddy for not adding pronouns from hexbear's fork

      it’s honestly embarassing the lemmy devs spent so long looking for a way to build anti-fash measures into their software with the slur filter and still haven’t added pronouns to the main lemmy codebase.

      i respect the project on the whole, but this is indicative of a lot of the arrogance I’ve lowkey seen around any idea that wasn’t originally there’s. hoping they get over whatever the fuck tech bro brain is going on, seems like they’re getting better since they let the hexbear devs merge most of the codebase back… besides pronouns.

      lea-why

      • kristina [she/her]
        ·
        10 months ago

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

        • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]
          ·
          10 months 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]
            ·
            10 months 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]
            ·
            10 months 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]
          ·
          10 months 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]
            ·
            10 months 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.

  • Owl [he/him]
    ·
    10 months ago

    It'll take time.

    Banning creepers and misogynists is great, but they often go months without harassing any women. If your banning campaign hasn't been going on for months, you still haven't even gotten through the initial wave.

    Adding pronoun flairs is great, but women will be slow to adopt them for fear it'll single them out, especially if you haven't banned all the creepers and misogynists yet.

    Huge chunks of the internet have fewer than 50% women because women have spent a very long time being excluded from all sorts of online spaces. It will take a very long time for women who don't participate in online discussion to hear, through word of mouth, that it's actually okay on some specific website.

  • BolsheWitch [she/her, they/them]
    ·
    10 months ago

    step 1: ban any man that hates PSL

    step 2: add a “Taylor Swift” comm, use it as a honeypot to ban any guy that complains about Taylor Swift. Easy proxy for misogynistic brainworms.

    step 3: just keep finding shit like that and purging dude bruhs who can’t mind their manners and feel forced to shit on things they view as feminine instead of just like… fucking off and finding another post like a normal person lol

    Edit: upvote my request for c/TaylorSwift https://hexbear.net/post/625706

        • kristina [she/her]
          ·
          10 months ago

          i barely know who taylor swift is but yes, i am more than willing to pull out a swiffer wet jet supreme© and stan it

          • BolsheWitch [she/her, they/them]
            ·
            10 months ago

            she is the voice of a generation. Taylor Swift is more than a musician. She is an idea, a world-historical heroine, light itself.

            When people told me they hated Taylor Swift or (far worse) that they were "not swifties," I wish I had said in no uncertain terms: "I love Taylor Swift. I am in awe of her. I am set free by her. She will be the finest worldwide superstar our galaxy has ever seen."

            I wish, in those exchanges, I had not asked gentle, tolerant questions about a hater's ridiculous allergy to her, or Taytay’s fictional misdeeds and imagined character flaws. More deeply still, I wish I had not reasoned with anyone, patiently countered their ludicrous emotionalism and psychologically disturbed theories.

            I wish I had said, flatly, "I love her. I am gay as fuck for Taylor Swift. I am a big fat dyke for Gaylor.” As if I had been asked about my girlfriend or Fletcher. No defensiveness or polemics; not dignifying the crazy allegations with so much as a Gawker or PinkNews link.

              • infuziSporg [e/em/eir]
                ·
                10 months ago

                That was always such a weird slur. There's an anti-gay slur that implies that a class of people is meant for burning, and then there's this, a big earthwork. Like what, is Peter the little hero of Holland going to put his finger in the lady to stop the flooding? Yeah real offensive.

  • Awoo [she/her]
    ·
    10 months ago

    With lemmy's structure it is fundamentally impossible to make lemmy (as a whole) safer for women, or any marginalised groups for that matter. If the leadership of a particular instance is dogshit then there is nothing that can be done about that. You will never convince the leaders of lemmy.world to deal with the misogyny, fat hate and general bigotry that is pervasive on that community for example. They just won't do it.

    What you can do is create clusters of instances that are better. If you wanted to do this in an organised way then you'd bring together a bunch of instance leaders, draw up some sort of charter and guidelines, and all collectively agree to enforce them. These leaders would then all work together to hold each other to the standards set. The fact that all these instances conform to a specific set of standards can then be a flagship for the group, a selling point to people looking to judge one set of instances over another. Without taking an organisational approach you're basically just left with making statements like "please be nicer to women" and leaving it up to individual community members, which isn't going to have any particularly significant effect.

    I would also suggest adding pronouns be part of any charter like this. Eliminating the invisibility of gender removes the "male is default" mindset that guys on the internet tend to have.

  • Thordros [he/him, comrade/them]
    ·
    10 months ago

    cis men think before posting

    berdly-actually SPEAKING STRICTLY OF DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE MALES AND THE FFFFEEEEEMALES, I THINK—

  • milistanaccount09 [she/her]
    ·
    10 months ago

    this is something ive commented about but it is incredibly trivial to check someone's pronouns. even if they aren't in the name just open their profile to see if it's in the profile blurb, its incredibly fucking simple and if someone misgenders someone on lemmy it is completely their fucking fault. I know I got into a bit of an argument about this recently and it was frustrating how many users seemed to not fret too much about it ('as long as im using they it's completely okay right?' explosion) I do kinda wish i had a proper Women forum here to post in (though I probably wouldnt be interested in modding anything lmao). I do definetly want the ability to bitch about hating men without feeling like I'm stepping on anyone's toes.

    Frankly I've been a biit afraid to go full tilt on transmisogyny posting because I expect to get a serious amount of pushback which i mean is pretty visible-disgust but like that kind of is how it is yknow

  • keepcarrot [she/her]
    ·
    10 months ago

    Hopefully have a culture of not sending any private messages until it's publicly cleared. :/

  • xXthrowawayXx [none/use name]
    ·
    10 months ago

    I uh am a cis man. I’ve been involved in making some physical spaces safer and it was pretty much what the mods do in this nonphysical space. Kicking people out, not accepting bullshit and being accepting of minorities.

    There’s no nice way to go about it and we got results with an inclusive strategy and a hard line.

    Why the hell aren’t we federated with lit.cafe?

    • kristina [she/her]
      ·
      10 months ago

      reasons.jpg

      im not fully convinced that they are truly interested in looking out for marginalized people without federating the instance that has the highest rates of them but federates shit like lemmy.world lmao. its specifically excluding the bulk of people from that conversation.

      • xXthrowawayXx [none/use name]
        ·
        10 months ago

        If it involves their lives changing they do not want to have an inclusive space. Liberalism profile 1,3,6,8 and 9.

    • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]
      ·
      10 months ago

      Why the hell aren’t we federated with lit.cafe?

      They use an excuse about how we're much bigger and more active than them, but we all know the real reason.

      • xXthrowawayXx [none/use name]
        ·
        10 months ago

        I mean, they’re right. Adding a big active instance of people who already read and have been training in 10x earths gravity book club discussions will change the experience there.

        The question is if they want an inclusive space enough to accept that change.

      • commiewithoutorgans [he/him, comrade/them]
        ·
        10 months ago

        Or gender correctly (with threats of removal/ban for misgendering) with structurally requiring pronouns like Hexbear? That's the solution version instead of the band-aid "they/them if you're unsure" version.

  • Cris@lemm.ee
    ·
    10 months ago

    Its debatable/unclear whether I count as a cis man, but I think a really big one is being willing to call something out as being out of line, or disrespectful to another person. You have to be willing to contribute to a culture that doesn't accept disrespect towards populations other than the majority of the platform, and that holds people here to a higher standard than most places on the internet