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I had much more toxic behavior at reddit, but it is hard to imagine any safe space online anywhere.
it definitely depends where you go on all platforms. blahaj zone is good, world is bad. places moderated by mods with actual experience are generally good, places moderated by jordanlund and similar get pretty toxic pretty fast. :(
Lemmy is a relatively small and niche platform, imo small platforms tend to be like that. First men show up, then transfems, and then cis women. We seem to be at the second stage and while things can be done better (like a female only instance) I do think things will get better.
In Mastodon, this is typically solved with defederation, block lists, and admins enforcing mod policies. How come this approach doesn't work for Lemmy? Is it not decentralized enough?
it’s not decentralized enough is exactly the answer. lemmy.world holds a huge portion of users and communities despite having middling at best moderation. illustrating this, one of my favorite communities (196) just recently tried to force everyone to migrate to .world. fortunately, the community at large openly rejected that absurd move, but it definitely exemplified the centralizing forces at play.
Yes. Just look at .world. As long as world is still federated into other communities, the fediverse is not federated.
Is there anything others can do to help? Feddit.uk wouldn't tolerate this but I'm not sure what a regular user can do apart from look out for harassment, call it out and report promptly
Keep in mind that this is probably very instance dependend. I use Beehaw which generally does not tolerate this sort of thing and this expectation is stated very clearly. For us down voting is not even possible. We also do not federate with nodes that cause the biggest issues. So there are things that can be done but it is not perfect and has consequences.
Just mentioning.
Edit: Even with that, there has been discussion of Beehaw leaving the threadiverse due to these issues and lack of mature moderation tools. Not sure where that stands.
wait, what? we have women in here? where?
I do get the joke; Even so, to this post's credit, that this comment [at time of writing] is +3 is a great representation of their challenges.
The whole point is about people feeling legitimate using the platform. Jokes feeding on the trope "there aren't women on the Internet" reinforces alienation. It makes sense they wouldn't feel comfortable if dismissal is the community upvoted response to them -already- feeling unwelcome.
I really don't see how upvoting a silly joke is a representation of anything.
It was solely meant for some giggles, to relax the conversation about a serious topic a slight bit. If you will, it's more like karma whoring [no pun intended].
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I run a few communities that I would consider to be fairly women-oriented, or at least I would expect them to be interested. I do not expect many men to be interested, and hey that's okay. I welcome anyone who wants to, but no harm if it's not your thing.
But any post that gets made gets downvoted to hell. I routinely have to moderate and remove posts of "Why is this here" and "This is stupid" even though there are people who enjoy it, they are just swarmed by other commenters, and it's made my members less active.
It's pretty clear how people vote and act here, I'm coming up on 2 years here and it's been like how you'd expect. Downvotes don't mean "I don't think this adds to the conversation" or "This is appropriate", they mean "I personally don't like this" here, and I think that kills a lot of our smaller communities.
Thanks for running those communities. I try to post to one of them where I can (I.e., make memes), but I’m not really a content creator. I just like to lurk in comments and respond when I feel like it’s worth me putting in my opinion or effort.
I’m aligned with your perspective. Hard to create or promote content when people downvote it due to hive mind. It’s discouraging and unwelcoming because it sends the signal “why is this here, you don’t belong in Lemmy”.
Thank you, Zoomies, that means a lot, honestly. I'm not one either, but I try to keep them going. I see the upvotes, people enjoy it, but I think many are a bit nervous to comment, but it'll grow eventually. I'm going to put some time on this over the next week to automate something I think
One thing I need to do is try to comment more. Hard to come up with stuff to say. And I’m one of those folks that types stuff, then second guesses it and backs out from posting.
I upvote what I can, but that’s always bare minimum effort. Consistent commenting is much more effort. And the extremely hard part is making original posts along with memes. I have no idea how Picard Maneuver does it. Bro carries Lemmy on his back alone lol.
I appreciate when you do, and I think others do too. One of the things I had to do was just stop caring about what other people thought. If they liked it, they'd upvote, or maybe they'd downvote, but no matter what you're adding to the conversation. I just dump out whatever I'm thinking now!
I do have to step up my meme game tho
Exactly why my instance has downvotes disabled
I deeply appreciate your decision to do that :3
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relevant discussions:
- !lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world true colors: https://lemmy.cafe/post/10574267
- incredible find: https://lemmy.cafe/post/10217719
- epic ratio: https://lemmy.cafe/post/9597634
- lemmy is a worse platform for women than reddit was: https://lemmy.cafe/post/4821164
this issue of such a massive proportion can only be solved with intention—it’s not getting fixed by accident. recognizing the problem is the first step.
I'm not quiet about being a woman, but have yet to receive dms or inappropriate responses or dismissals due to that fact (via lemmy).
EDIT: although elsewhere in this post's comment section I just received such a dismissal by someone who thought I was a man. Indeed, this is the direction in gender space along which I am used to experiencing such behavior, and it is why I have chosen to emphasize the fact that I am a female with a vagina so much in recent years: to get women to stop harassing me.
So I'll shout it out here: I'm a woman, if anyone has a problem with that or just wants to talk about it, please reach out.
I want to help solve the problem but I need to see it better first. I only ever see cherry-picked examples like you have collected here instead of seeing it in the wild. Don't get me wrong, the cherry-picked examples are bad, but I need more than a handful of outliers to really understand the problem and where it comes from before I can understand what I can do to help.
these aren’t cherry picked? these are quite normal—that’s why i started collecting them because they were so easy to find.
i respect your expression of experience of not having been on the receiving end of this that much—i will thank you to respect mine!
I do want to respect your experience and help to address the root problems leading to it.
That's why I am asking and engaging in this conversation: to be better informed and to help others subvert hate in this hate-filled time.
I'm also an odd case, as an intersex person who was socially raised (predominantly) male but in recent years transitioned to female mostly to avoid harassment. I get so much less hate when I'm perceived as a woman that your experience is somewhat foreign to me. Whether presenting as a man or as a woman, I get hate overwhelmingly from women. Women in our society are hate-filled and angry and don't know how to process emotions like discomfort caused by their intersexphobia nearly as well as men do.
A curated collection of the worst examples meets the definition of cherry picking. Cherry picking doesn't mean that your argument is invalid, just that there is missing context from the rest of the distribution of interactions. Any sufficiently large community will have enough assholes that bad behavior can be cherry picked from the extreme end of the distribution to be used as examples if someone wants to paint the whole community in a bad light.
That said, the extreme and cherry-picked examples are still a problem that need to be taken seriously. My life is an extreme and cherry-picked example that runs counter to the common narrative from "feminists" who think that blocking and ostracizing dissenting voices is a solution, instead of recognizing that reaction as exclusive and anti-diversity. I understand that extreme/unusual or cherry-picked examples need to be taken seriously and considered as edge cases. I am not trying to dismiss you, although my word choice last night maybe could have been more explicit on this point. I'm sorry. What I'm trying to communicate is that I need to better understand the problem (in context) to be able to help be part of the solution.
We need a better solution, and I want to help work towards that. I believe that starts with discussions like this one.
Yeah okay thanks i guess it just comes off really not nice for you to say that.
if you posted a list of the worst incidents in your experience of abuse, i truly doubt you would love my response to be calling you a cherry picker. even if you don’t mean it, it looks like siding with the abuser. it’s NOT cherry picking to tell my literal own damn story of what i deal with. if you truly mean differently, maybe choose different words
Any list of my experiences of abuse is a fundamentally cherry-picked list because my experiences are so far outside (what feminists claim to be) the norm.
I am explicitly calling myself a cherry picker and would have no problem with you doing the same. Everyone else sees my problems that way. It's just the truth.
I mean what I said.
EDIT: and to be clear, that includes my statement that even cherry-picked examples need to be taken seriously, however within proper context. I see that you've already downvoted me and probably moved on. I'm taking your lived experiences seriously, and you aren't taking mine seriously. I hope you will reconsider if you actually want to solve the root of the problems that we both are experiencing.
This situation seems to have spiraled a bit—I logged off for a few hours and came back to a bunch of DMs from you.
I want to make it clear that I don’t have any hard feelings toward you. However, this conversation has reached a point where it’s no longer productive.
You wouldn’t go to the comments of a person of color as they share their experiences and feelings about racism and say, “I only ever see cherry-picked examples like you have here.” But that’s essentially what you said to me about gender-based abuse. That kind of comment is: a) dismissive and encourages others to doubt the stories of victims, and b) a conversation-ender.
What you communicated to me is that my lived experience isn’t enough for you. As someone with a normal life and not a researcher, I have no way to provide the additional “data” you seem to require.
Ok, since you brought up my two short DMs, I'll post them here for public consumption.
I am very much trying to continue the conversation that you started about experiences of gender-based abuse by adding variety of experience from a very different perspective that contrast with the cherry-picked list that you provided of things you read online that resonated with your preconceptions. My examples are cherry-picked from my life; yours are cherry-picked from lemmy.
I am repeatedly echoing the sentiment of your original post: that we need to talk about and understand these things if we want to learn and grow. It's how humans share data.
You claim that I am being dismissive only because the cherry picked examples from my life experience come from an opposite tail of the distribution of gender-based abuse as your list. I can't help where my life experiences lie on this distribution, but I can share them (as you did) to provide some additional data that helps to fill out the range of the population.
You are dismissing me by saying that my experiences must be shared in bad faith to be dismissive/encourage doubt/end conversations. Please re-read my words. They are trying to communicate that I DESPERATELY want a conversation on this topic so that we can all learn and grow from each others' experiences. Just because my experiences are different from yours does not make them bad-faith.
From your behavior, I'm starting to suspect that this is projection and that you are a bad-faith troll who refuses to engage with others if they have different life experiences. However, I don't believe that yet because you and I have had several other conversations in various other comments sections over the past year which have been good and productive and I have grown to like you.
I want a productive conversation on this topic, yet you only seem to want to dismiss my perspective. This runs contrary to our past interactions. Please, I'm trying to have a productive conversation.
That said, the examples you give aren't your personal lived experience as much as extreme examples of sexism that you've stumbled across on this site and curated. The examples that I'm giving are genuine and personal lived experience as a gender minority (neither male or female) rather than things I read online. I don't think that that makes one set of examples more valid than the other, just that these fact make your most recent comment seem highly hypocritical. You are replying to a minority trying to share their experiences and feelings by dismissing me, encouraging others to doubt me, and ending the conversation without engaging with our differences of life experience. Then you accuse me of doing that instead of actually engaging with my perspective. Please reconsider. I'll end this here, but if you want to have an honest and genuine discussion about how to solve the issue of gender-based abuse that you brought up, my DMs are always open.
i just don’t want to bud. you ruined all the good i could have gotten from this conversation before it even started.
Genuinely not trying to. Genuinely trying to be productive.
Good luck trying to solve social issues alone, friend.
dont worry im not alone i have plenty of people in my corner who dont spam me with weird begging behavior when i stop interacting with them
to be clear you seem nice you are just being offputting and weird doing this negging behavior- if this was a real life relationship i would cut ties with you immediately. please chill tf out.
I'm only begging because I'm desperate to be welcome in your corner and I'm desperate for solidarity and I'm desperate for anyone with your class of experiences to be willing to listen and engage with anything outside of your own goddamn echo chamber bubble.
There's beauty and longing in desperation, it means that you've not given up.
I'm sorry that you're so lacking in empathy.
Hey, starting over here:
You’re welcome in my corner, homie! I want to approach this with good faith, but I need to address some things because your earlier approach made me deeply uncomfortable. I hope we can work toward mutual understanding, but I also need to set a few boundaries going forward:
- Please don’t call someone sharing personal experiences “cherry picking.” I’m sharing my stories of sexual and gender-based harassment, which are deeply personal and reflect my lived reality. Using that term minimizes the seriousness of these experiences. Even if you didn’t mean it that way, it’s a loaded phrase—so let’s leave it behind.
- Respect someone’s boundaries when it comes to DMs. Messaging me directly after I’ve logged off or expressed discomfort felt invasive. Going forward, please keep the conversation to where it started unless I explicitly invite a DM.
- Avoid labeling someone as “lacking in empathy” because they’re uncomfortable engaging. It’s fine to feel hurt or frustrated, but projecting that onto me was unfair and added to my discomfort.
I’m doing my best to approach this with a blank slate and give you the benefit of the doubt. I don’t hold any ill will toward you, but I need these boundaries respected for us to move forward. If they’re crossed again, I’ll have to block and report. I hope it doesn’t come to that.
Thank you for coming towards me and expressing boundaries. I'm going to come towards you now. To do so I will focus on the boundaries of our experience that you have outlined. I'll go in reverse order.
- I'm sorry for criticizing your lack of empathy earlier in this interaction. It was inappropriate. I understand that everyone has busy lives and only so much energy to devote to any given interaction. I understand that your lack of empathy was situational, and not intrinsic to you. It would have been more precise for me to say that from my perspective it appears that you lacked the bandwidth for empathy earlier in this interaction. Even so, it is probably inappropriate for me to have a default expectation of empathy from others. I understand how my wording could make you think that I was accusing you of being incapable of empathy altogether. I did not mean to "label" you as intrinsically lacking in empathy, just to point out the lack of it in this interaction. Your interpretation was not my intention and I apologize for my imprecision. I also want to take this moment to thank you for investing some empathy in your latest reply to me.
.
- I can avoid DMing you if that's something you are uncomfortable with. Thanks for letting me know. I was only trying to inform you that I had added an edit to try to better express my empathy to you. Although I don't understand why and would appreciate elaboration, I'll avoid reaching out to you directly in the future if it makes you uncomfortable. I now better understand some of your earlier comments: I thought you were talking about inappropriate DMs specifically (e.g. dick pics or harassment or insults or whatever), not that you apparently have a problem with DMs generally. Now I know; thank you for communicating.
.
- I need to push back here a little bit because this is a key point of our disagreement and I believe it's something that we need to discuss if we want to reach a common understanding. My use of the term "cherry picking", as I have repeatedly tried to explain in this conversation, does not in any way minimize your experiences. I am only trying to call a spade a spade and have an honest discussion about the data being presented. I am using a common term to describe a type of data collection and presentation that almost universally applies to anecdotal evidence, simply by the nature of human psychology (e.g. confirmation bias) relevant to the generation of anecdotes. If we cannot call cherry picked data by its name, we cannot have a serious discussion about how to respond to it. I repeat what I have said previously in this thread: your cherry-picked personal experiences are valid and ought to be taken seriously if we want to solve the problem of sexual and gender-based harassment. Please take mine seriously as well. You have refused to engage with or even acknowledge them, which is the crux of my stated perception of a lack of empathy.
At this point I would normally offer to move this conversation into DMs, but I understand that that would make you uncomfortable.
I see that you are trying, and I hope that you see that I am as well. Since DMs are out, how would you like to proceed?
EDITED to fix numbering
Hi, new person in this conversation. I hope you don't mind if I drop my two cents here.
Cherry Picking is the practice of choosing evidence that supports your argument while ignoring evidence against it. It is also almost always intentional, or a result of ignorance, and the term carries negative connotations. Cherry picking is an accusation of bad faith arguing, and people will interpret it that way regardless of your intent.
For ones own experiences, which are inherently anecdotal, the ancedotal fallacy might be more applicable. But it's only a fallacy if that narrow view is used to make a broad claim. I don't think pointing out the existence of a certain kind of conversation is very broad, and in the context of this thread just a few instances can have a large effect.
I would even go so far as to argue that you are commiting an argument from ancedote when you dismiss the claim that harrassment exists with only your ancedotal evidence of not having seen it yourself. They brought sources, and you dismissed their experience as not good enough with no supporting evidence. If you really want to dismiss the notion that their evidence is significant, you could try seeing how many people interacted with those posts compared to average interactions for those communities, or checking how often you visit those communities to put your own experiences in context. Anything but dismissing them and refusing to engage with the intent of the message.
It's true that everyone is susceptible to confirmation bias and dozens of other faults of logic, and it's also true that recognizing those faults is important for improving, but being so aggressive in the specifics of data validation can be alienating and will likely miss the intended message.
Just my two cents, dismiss as you please. I do hope this ends up being useful to someone though.
I know that you haven't responded to my other post yet, and I'd usually put this aside into a DM, but I just wanted to thank you for being willing to use this medium to litigate the boundaries of our shared reality.
I am a male with a penis but it is a very feminine penis and I stand in solidarity with your vagina. In fact,. Ny.penis' name is Cassandra, which is neither here nor there but it is indeed a fact.
Being serious for a moment though: I agree with your rational approach here. I have found Lemmy to be more hostile than reddit overall, and while I condemn hostility based on gender or race (I very much applaud hostility based on religion though) I think we NEED THIS SO FUCKING BADLY.
The entire internet has become a bland cesspool of meaningless garbage. I think the current state of things has proven that what inevitably begins as a laudable attempt to stomp out hhate speech (which I condemn) the window invariably gets wider and wider until meaningful dialogue is silenced.
We should be very fucking hostile towards Nazis. We should be hostile towards avaricious governments and unchecked human greed. We should be hostile towards proselytization, and anyone that cant understand that freedom FROM religion is as, or more important than, freedom OF religion. And while I can see the need to ban outright calls for violence as being necessary, the ubiquity of iron-clad moderation makes me very concerned about what will happen when there is a legitimate need to react against violent acts from entrenched power systems towards the oppressed.
While the comments here about "go make your own instance" are dismissive, I do agree with then in spirit. I want to participate in communities that eschew group think and promote real dialoguue. Especially dialogue I don't agree with.
The power of the fediverse is that if someone wants to copy the bland corporate safe space that is the rest of the internet there is fuck all stopping them.
Hard agree about it being worse then Reddit. It's gotten to the point where I don't engage as much as I want to and thinking about going back to Reddit. I'm sure there are people that would like that.
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I do agree that the reports and downvotes of topics geared toward women are very widespread which is exhausting, and can make it hard to talk about the things you want to. Most of the virulent, misogynistic comments get removed quickly but often the damage is already done by then. I have learned over the years on the internet that sometimes I should let womens', trans' and other races' people's spaces be their spaces, and check carefully if whatever I have to say really adds to the conversation or just minimizes/drowns out the opinions of the minority audience the community is for. So I have had the urge to participate but have backed off. I'm a bit torn because the lack of activity can also make a community feel unwelcoming, but I am concerned that even my most well-intentioned comments could have a blind spot or inherent bias that makes it also unwelcoming.
The solution I see is that a woman safe-space instance is needed, whose admins ban misogony, unhelpful comments and reports, mass downvoting etc., to the point where some might feel the actions are like PTB. Beehaw has a strict moderation stance, they even defedded from lemmy.world due to the amount of toxicity they had to deal with, but they are able to curate a more welcoming experience. We are still "early days of Reddit", it will take time and effort from users of all genders to make it a better place.
One of my first experiences on Lemmy was a bunch of mens rights activists celebrating a women's tech job fair being overrun by men.
I'm not surprised that this is a problem. Lemmy's main demographic is the tech obsessed, that's always going to be filled with misogynistic neckbeards.
Don't say always.
It's defeatist.
And this I why I don't either
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this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2025
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