"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?"
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.
hi, yes, it’s me, the person who suggested the idea of leftynet :3