(Content warning, discussions of SA and misogyny, mods I might mention politics a bit but I hope this can be taken outside the context of politics and understood as a discussion of basic human decency)
We all know how awful Reddit was when a user mentioned their gender. Immediate harassment, DMs, etc. It’s probably improved over the years? But still awful.
Until recently, Lemmy was the most progressive and supportive of basic human dignity of communities I had ever followed. I have always known this was a majority male platform, but I have been relatively pleased to see that positive expressions of masculinity have won out.
All of that changed with the recent “bear vs man” debacle. I saw women get shouted down just for expressing their stories of being sexually abused, repeatedly harassed, dogpiled, and brigaded with downvotes. Some of them held their ground, for which I am proud of them, but others I saw driven to delete their entire accounts, presumably not to return.
And I get it. The bear thing is controversial; we can all agree on this. But that should never have resulted in this level of toxicity!
I am hoping by making this post I can kind of bring awareness to this weakness, so that we can learn and grow as a community. We need to hold one another accountable for this, or the gender gap on this site is just going to get worse.
The good thing about lemmy is that it don’t get directive from any governments to censor certain issues like what happen to Google, reddit, meta and other social media For any other case, the mods will take care of the instances. If you don’t like it, just block whichever instances, communities or users you want. Whats so difficult about that? Nobody is forcing you to be in whatever toxic instance/community is or to read posts that you don’t like.
Bro there is like maybe 25 active communities on here… if I have to block half of them then what’s the point of being here?
when the toxic behavior is spread over multiple communities and instances like this, that’s an indicator that the problem is systemic rather than individual
that the kind of people you’ll come across in liber-media. You’ll find toxic people, but you’ll also find accommodating people. If you want to play safe, then I don’t think any lemmy or any future-whatever-libre-non-lemmy will suit your taste. Make your own server and just make sure that whoever subscribed to that are up to your expectation.