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?
Conversation ongoing over there, inviting anyone who wants to participate to please consider sharing their thoughts if they are willing to. If you wanna post in the original thread from your instance copy and paste the link into your instances search panel
As I said in the thread, if you aren’t comfortable posting feel free to DM me here or on matrix and I can post anonymously for you.
Many of the admins and mods on the threadiverse are cis men, and cis men with a history of reddit norms informing how they approach community building here. And in combination, that means that lots of the subtle stuff, the “just asking questions” guys, the “not all men” folk etc, end up shaping the threadiverse “overton window”. And that means that the “we like the status quo as it is” voices dominate the conversation and ensure that nothing changes.
The only way it will change is people who aren’t happy with the status quo actively start challenging it and moderating in a way that shifts it.
And I don’t see that happening en masse. There’s a reason beehaw is close to leaving, and that’s a large part of it. They tried to shift that status quo, they tried to challenge it, and they have very little external support in doing so :\
I’ve mentioned it other times, and I think it’s the answer to the question in this post:
“How can we make Lemmy a safer place for women?”
The same way that would make Beehaw want to stay!
IMHO, Beehaw is a litmus test for the ability of Lemmy itself to become a safer place for anyone.
the threadiverse “overton window”
I don’t think the threadiverse has a single Overton window, more like each instance has its own. The threadiverse allows those to interact (federate), or not (defederate). There is a lot of technical solutions missing for instances with partially overlapping Overton windows to interact, but I think it’s something that can be done, that should be done.
I honestly don’t know…
Many of the admins and mods on the threadiverse are cis men, and cis men with a history of reddit norms informing how they approach community building here. And in combination, that means that lots of the subtle stuff, the “just asking questions” guys, the “not all men” folk etc, end up shaping the threadiverse “overton window”. And that means that the “we like the status quo as it is” voices dominate the conversation and ensure that nothing changes.
The only way it will change is people who aren’t happy with the status quo actively start challenging it and moderating in a way that shifts it.
And I don’t see that happening en masse. There’s a reason beehaw is close to leaving, and that’s a large part of it. They tried to shift that status quo, they tried to challenge it, and they have very little external support in doing so :\
It says so much that so many of us are so used to it, we’re sunny bother to complain [anymore].
I’ve mentioned it other times, and I think it’s the answer to the question in this post:
The same way that would make Beehaw want to stay!
IMHO, Beehaw is a litmus test for the ability of Lemmy itself to become a safer place for anyone.
I don’t think the threadiverse has a single Overton window, more like each instance has its own. The threadiverse allows those to interact (federate), or not (defederate). There is a lot of technical solutions missing for instances with partially overlapping Overton windows to interact, but I think it’s something that can be done, that should be done.