(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.
Preach it. One can appreciate mods efforts while also pushing back against respectability and “civility” discourse. Far from mutually exclusive, we need folks to more often acknowlwdge how exhausting the same tired mythbusting gets.
Moderation is lethal unless it prefigures itself to account for those who are silenced (and often far worse) by the wave of noise that is the statua quo. It’s not just some nice thing a person does. There is a power dynamic and that means responsiblilty, being held accountable to that responsibilty, and if nothing fucking else than not being surprised to be greeted with frustrated profanity where they have fallen short. Maybe mod less subforums, but dont blame the marginalized folks standing up for themselves.