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.

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

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.

I had much more toxic behavior at reddit, but it is hard to imagine any safe space online anywhere.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.