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.

And this I why I don't either

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.

Yup, that's a problem. Specially because, once the gender ratio gets too skewed towards one side (it is), the Petrie multiplier kicks in; then the sexism targets each woman more and more frequently.

Potential solutions that I see for the problem:

• Perhaps creating a few instances for women? I don't mean instances to talk only about feminism, but for general stuff. With higher standards against harassment.
• Better mod policing against harassment. Collective action, so it's easy to say and hard to do it, I know.

Back when I used Reddit, one of my favorite subs was TrollX. If we had a sub with that spirit, it would be a good start.

Are there secret communities on Lemmy? Not that secret communities should be a default, but I was invited to a secret sub on Reddit years ago that was all women. It was a true safe space from harrassment, where we could talk about feminine things that we knew wouldn’t gain traction in main subs. I have no idea how it started, but I knew that users who were invited to join had previously been vetted by the sub’s mods - they saw that I’d made feminist posts and multiple comments about being a woman, and didn’t go around picking fights. It was like a background check.

I don’t believe there is any one solution, but starting with dedicated communities (in the spirit of TrollX), with mods that smack down misogyny and (actual) trolls, sounds like the best way to start.

Thanks for the enlightening thread. And that puts a dampener on the enthusiasm that I was feeling for this place. Not that I should be surprised or anything.

I might misunderstand how things work here but it sounds to me like if entire communities are getting bombed by downvotes, then it's the various admins across instances that are allowing this to happen. And it puts a bit of a dark cloud over this place now for me.

Not good. We need Lemmy and the fediverse represent all people as a whole if er hope to become the standard backbone of internet communication.

It's especially jarring coming from Mastodon, which is broadly more diverse than Lemmy. I've witnessed some really questionable comments here during the last year. I really hope something can be done to improve things. I think a feminist-specific instance might be the best option, much in the way someplace like Hexbear has managed to create a fairly strong community bloc with strong core beliefs.