So to preface this is posted in literature.cafe’s meta community but this
question is primarily aimed at generally anyone in the lemmyverse who is NOT a
cisgender man no matter what instance they may be in. The purpose of this thread
is to present a stage for conversation for those willing to contribute, and
although cisgender men are not excluded I kindly ask you to be mindful of the
fact what this thread is meant for and try to avoid talking over others here. If
you are a cisgender man interested in learning and seeing how lemmy can improve
like I am: welcome. For those who are here to cause issues or talk over others
though, you will be promptly removed. I do not know the demographic data of
lemmy, but I would wager a large portion are male. And over the past few weeks I
have witnessed women on numerous occasion discuss their discomfort on here.
Reddit very much had a very “bro-y” feeling culture for many, that felt like a
barrier to entry to many women. With lemmy, there’s a potential to break this.
But the answer really is how? Lemmy has begun to develop into its own culture
already independent of Reddit quite rapidly, and it’s been awesome to see but I
am wondering if there’s a way we can push it a step further and implement ways
to make the platform more welcoming to women than Reddit previously did.
Thoughts?
Conversation ongoing over there, inviting anyone who wants to participate to please consider sharing their thoughts if they are willing to. If you wanna post in the original thread from your instance copy and paste the link into your instances search panel
As I said in the thread, if you aren’t comfortable posting feel free to DM me here or on matrix and I can post anonymously for you.
This is true, and ultimately I think it captures the problems with all social interaction including this topic. How do we determine what is acceptable or even welcoming behaviour/content? Frequently by majority. And if the majority has started heavily skewed to one demographic, then anyone coming in afterwards starts as an outsider in some way. And if the tools are built by a skewed majority, the tools will fix what the skewed majority considers important.
I have no solutions for this, I’m just thinking out loud and you got me on this path. Sorry for the notification!
Yes, of course, but this is the beauty of federated systems running on open source platforms, isn’t it? No matter the bias, both the tooling can be changed, and instances with a different bias can be set up. There is always going to be a bias, but there is no lock-in to a single one.
In this particular case, there are some possible technical solutions:
The simplest one, would be to just allow instance admins pick which communities they wish to feature in their instance’s “All” feed. Not an “all as controlled by users”, but an “all as controlled by admins” (this in itself is a “curious” bias introduced by the upstream developers, given their political views… but let’s not delve into that)
A more advanced solution, but equally desirable, would be adding support for custom feeds (see: multireddits, Twitter timelines, Mastodon), with “All” being just one of them that happened to be controlled and promoted by the instance’s admin, configurable through the same interface as any other.
It may not be possible, or even desirable, to remove all bias, but it can be left to the user to pick which one they like more.
(And don’t worry, I’m also thinking out loud… since right now I’m unable to get hands-on to adding any of these options, and it’s eating me alive 😅)
This is true, and ultimately I think it captures the problems with all social interaction including this topic. How do we determine what is acceptable or even welcoming behaviour/content? Frequently by majority. And if the majority has started heavily skewed to one demographic, then anyone coming in afterwards starts as an outsider in some way. And if the tools are built by a skewed majority, the tools will fix what the skewed majority considers important.
I have no solutions for this, I’m just thinking out loud and you got me on this path. Sorry for the notification!
Yes, of course, but this is the beauty of federated systems running on open source platforms, isn’t it? No matter the bias, both the tooling can be changed, and instances with a different bias can be set up. There is always going to be a bias, but there is no lock-in to a single one.
In this particular case, there are some possible technical solutions:
It may not be possible, or even desirable, to remove all bias, but it can be left to the user to pick which one they like more.
(And don’t worry, I’m also thinking out loud… since right now I’m unable to get hands-on to adding any of these options, and it’s eating me alive 😅)