(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.
Thanks. I haven’t seen the debate on Lemmy, but TBH, I won’t expect Lemmy to be better than Reddit. Personally I believe the hypotheticals like these are counterproductive. I have never seen these thought experiments bring up meaningful discussions.
What I always see at the end is isolation of any minority community and forcing them to their own space. Then the majority will start complaining they are excluded. I’m sick of this loop.
I’m with you. For my part I am trying to just encourage a space of positivity under these memes, listening to women express their stories of course because that was the original point.
But then once that is said and done, I don’t recommend we ever come back to the bear hypothetical, double down on it, or encourage any man to take it personally. Because yeah while it grabs attention, it’s also rhetorically just very inefficient compared to something as simple as posting bell hooks memes.
Literally how?? Your post here is crying about how Lemmy is full of bigotry, yet that’s simply not true. Lemmy is divided by instances and you should find instances that match your values instead of trying to hold every single instance to a standard. Just delink the trash like Lemmy.ml
How is this post encouraging positive spaces when you’re only whining about how all instances aren’t what you want them to be?
Do you understand the instance concept at all???
Comment reported. Rather than removal, as I don’t feel you broke a rule, I decided to respond directly.
Instances aren’t isolated. Yes, we have individual instances, but they are FEDERATED. We don’t have one central governing body, but generally speaking, instances that are federated between one another have very similar views. If you can see this, that means your instance is federated with an instance I can see or am a part of.
Saying to “find an instance that matches your values” shows you have almost no understanding of how the federated technology and ideology works.
If this is a divisive meme and it’s divisive across many instances, how is this post going along with the idealogy of federated technonology?