So, I don’t think it was just the Hexbear mods going full all on their own that helped calm things down in that neck of the Fediverse.

The mod that kinda started it all (while making some bad calls) had a point when they got tired of the userbase just letting stuff happen and started a purge. It was kinda our fault for letting shitty stuff happen without pushback from the user base or worse, the userbase making excuses for the bad stuff.

It will be up to the posters and commenters to report, question, draw attention to, etc any accounts/posts/comments that go too far. This doesn’t mean sitting on the report button and making it a moderators problem. Its the userbase that is the fist line of the immune system for the community, not the mods. Building up enough of a raport with the other users and having the confidence to push back on the edge cases is essential to creating the proper “vibe”. From there the moderators should be able to do their thing with more confidence and slightly less stress.

So… try not to let the “just asking questions”, “but my !?!?!”, “can you take a joke ” type of stuff go without push back for long. It creates divisions and damages confidence in the users who want to help keep things properly maintained but aren’t super confident in spotting/engaging in debatelord stuff.

Personally, I dig the emojis. :Fry is a good one as a signal that a comment or post is pushing the boundary a bit. A mindful person might reassess their post/comment and back off if they’re not trying to cause problems and if they aren’t mindful, it can be a signal for some of the more powerful posters/commenters to pay attention here.

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.

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.

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.

Good post, also ur username goes hard 👍

step 1: ban any man that hates

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

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

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?

Wait, there are women on the internet now?

Someone fetch me my fainting couch

cis men think before posting

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

So, not a woman, and not trying to talk over anyone. But perhaps something that could be done is a “women of ____” community on each instance. For instance, [email protected], [email protected], et cetera that’s modded in a similar way to witches vs the patriarchy on reddit. A space for women, modded by women. Men aren’t banned or anything, but the space is intentionally woman-oriented, be they cis or trans. Each instance could make their own, which would mean dozens of such communities, some generalist, some focused on specific issues, fandoms or interests. At the very least, it may help bring more women to lemmy, and more women on lemmy should help prevent the bro-yness.

Again, though, not a woman, so please do point out if that feels segregationy or something, that’s not the intent.

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

Anyone tried incredible violence?

Good post.

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 but like that kind of is how it is yknow