(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.

  • @Smoogs
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    5 months ago

    Well my block list on lemmy grew a whole lot faster and is longer now than on it ever was on Reddit.

    But This was even before the bear debacle.

    Lemmy is not as good as advertised.

    • @Desistance
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      175 months ago

      Lemmy was never Reddit. It’s a decentralized network of websites. Not all of them will be kosher.

      • @Fades
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        85 months ago

        Fucking this, all of these commenters comparing it to Reddit are telling on themselves. Lemmy has many instances there is no one “lemmy”

        • @TubularTittyFrog
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          105 months ago

          it’s people from reddit bringing their bad habits form reddit with them and wondering why lemmy isn’t ‘different’.

    • jelloeater - Ops MgrA
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      35 months ago

      It also depends on what you are looking for content wise. Lemmy the platform does have a … Interesting… History for sure. On Lemmy.World I have very little patience for misogyny and being shitty twords queer folks. So I guess, “it’s complicated” is a unfortunate answer. NGL Mastodon and BlueSky are where I go to interact with other folks, vs Lemmy which I just get the old Reddit doom scroll from.

      • @Smoogs
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        05 months ago

        Yeah I was just a bit let down given that lemmy was kinda sold on Reddit to users who were sick of a capitalist environment protecting the hate speech vs a safe haven where mods were ‘without shackles’. the results show this is far from the reality of where the problem really lies.

        • @Fades
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          -15 months ago

          There is no singular Lemmy, you were sold on a lie, that’s not Lemmy’s fault it’s yours for not doing your due diligence.

          Find an instance that values what you value, it’s not hard.

          Here you are judging the entire fucking platform based on some negative experience in a single instance lmao

          • @Smoogs
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            15 months ago

            And yet here, look, another has been added to the block list.

          • YeetPics
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            05 months ago

            This comment is a REALLY GOOD example of the point OP and the parent comment were making.