With more people joining Lemmy and other decentralised networks there is a growing shift to the common misogyny and sexism we find on other social media networks (YouTube, Reddit, etc.).
I think it’s pretty obvious that the reason is that there are even less women here than other places online. What are your ideas on how to change that? Or do you feel it is a lost cause?
How do you know they’re less women here than other places?
Because all communities and topics that have engagement from women on, for example, Reddit are practically dead on Lemmy.
I found it to be similar for the male communities too (askmen, malefashionadvice, etc). There’s a pretty nice balance on Mastodon, so maybe Lemmy needs time?
We can totally work on issues in the meantime too, not saying there isn’t an issue :)
As for the question, I don’t think it’s a lost cause. I’ll write out some ideas in a bit!
Ok so I think that growing the women-oriented communities would follow similar steps to any other community. A big part of that is just communicating the benefits and risks.
Positives:
Negatives:
privacy - You can’t ever delete something on the internet, but it’s even harder with federation. This isn’t a woman specific issue, but it’s one that could affect women more/differently so it’s worth talking about. It’s harder to fight against doxxing, and it’s harder to ensure your account is deleted if you’re trying to fight stalkers. Some of this can be fixed by improving the software, and I’m not clear on what the implications are just yet. But it was worth noting
Lemmy specific: Moderation tools aren’t strong enough yet. Women-oriented communities might attract trolls.
How to grow the communities
get in touch with existing community moderators and set up a parallel / sister community setup. Encourage people to post on both, let those moderators moderate on Lemmy. Trust would help a lot in this case
need more time to think of specific points, but for now other community building ideas would apply too
Thank you for your thoughts!
I want to emphasize this one:
I think the Lemmy instance beehaw is predominantly or exclusive led by women and well, when I remember correctly it had to aggressively defederate from multiple bigger instances… Heavy moderation costs time and thereby money. And a huge factor in this is that instances and communities which announce heavy moderation seem to attract that extra truckload of trolls. I don’t want to start a drama discussion here, just to underline that moderation problem.
Oh I didn’t know that about Beehaw, that’s cool to know :)
Yes that makes sense, and I think some Reddit communities tried and couldn’t establish here for that reason (askHistorians). Lemmy needs to make the moderation easier in order for things to work out for everyone
What makes you think women aren’t engaging in topics though? Because they don’t say “I’m a woman and…” in the comments?
I think you’d be surprised.
(Edit. Oh I get it, because we’re not engaging in your topics. Gotcha)
I added some more thoughts now :)
Let’s start with a list of women communities on Lemmy to identify mods to get in touch with. I haven’t ventured out far from this instance, so I unfortunately don’t know of any on other instances.
What do you mean with parallel setup? Posts being posted to one automatically appearing on another community?
This has been on my mind this evening and I actually just made a post on !fediverse@lemmy.world with some communities!
@ParsnipWitch@feddit.de I hope that was ok, and I can unlink this post if you prefer
I think ‘sister community’ or “Official Lemmy community for ____” might give a better idea of what I was thinking of. It’s something that I’ve been working on with other mods for c/UBC (my university) and c/Medicine (+ a few others that are still in the works), where communities have the same mods and rules. So the process would include some or all of the following:
I’ve played with the idea of automating posts, but people have concerns about deletion, moderation (ex. what happens if something is removed from one), spam.
Good idea. I went off reddit completely as the enshittification got too bad, but returning occasionally to point out there’s a sister community on reddit might be something worthwhile. I hadn’t realized you were talking subreddits, I thought you were just thinking about connecting between lemmy communities for women.