(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.
I think the distributed nature of the Fediverse is a big part of it. Lot of moderation policies at play, on a lot of different instances and some allow some real jerks to flourish and spill out elsewhere. I have zero tolerance for any of that garbage and am very quick with my block/ban buttons, but those are only effective on my own instance or the few communities I moderate outside that.
OP, best I can suggest is to report them. Most of the communities I interact with are pretty responsive to those kinds of reports and similarly don’t tolerate it. Mods, unfortunately, can’t read every comment and often rely on reports to know when to look deeper/take action.
And don’t feel bad about blocking the jerks. There’s a lot of them, lol.
good, please do likewise. that’s an excellent start :)