I abandoned Reddit over the weekend in advance of the blackout. As a trans woman, I tended to keep myself to myself in some very subject specific subreddits and avoided anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment for the most part (although certainly not homophobic language). Not ideal but it was manageable.
I was wondering how everybody in the same boat as me has found Lemmy? I had relatively high hopes given my positive experiences with the Fedivers in the past on Mastodon instances. Most there had pretty progressive stances even if they were not specifically LGBTQ+ focused.
Anyway, I lasted two days on lemmy.world. I wanted to be positive and explore and engage widely but there was zero action taken on slurs and transphobic concern trolling comments. Then the parental concern posts from other instances started popping into the All / Active feed, and I figured there was little chance of seeing any instance defederations happening. I could only see one defederation listed total.
I suppose I could have stuck it out for longer. The trouble is I have seen all of this before many times over. So here I am on lemmy.blahaj.zone instead. 💚
I have felt so much safer here and comfortable. I think staying here has been best, both because based url, but also I love having a queer focused space. I feel much less exposed. I know some people might come in, but having a no transphobia policy feels so much better considering the amount of causal transphobia I used to see in some of my communities even if they were meant to be “Safe”. I also love the discussions here and so far feels so much less cliquish and open
I liken it to having a “home.” I can go out and read whatever bigger community in whatever instance, but I can also stay home at Blåhaj if I don’t have the emotional energy to handle raw uncut internet stranger today. Reddit, even in smaller communities, always had a risk of a wandering bigot.
Server perfomance is also a big plus. Even on some of the other, smaller, more IT driven instances I experienced way more lag then here
While browsing communities, I encountered a “gendercritical” one on a different instance. 🤮 (not lemmy.world) BUT, I took time to contact one of that instance’s admins about it since they had a non-discrimination rule, and they decided to close it down after educating themselves about it. So that’s something nice that would never happen on Reddit. 🙂 But even so, Blahaj Zone is still the place to be! 🏳️⚧️
Yasss blahaj #1
That does sound a bit more positive than my experience.
I’ve run across a few comments on other instances that wouldn’t’ve been out of place in terf island’s sub on reddit.
Well, Mastodon is just older and more matured compared to lemmy. The biggest Mastodon instance run by the main Mastodon Dev Eugen Rochko features an elephant holding up a trans flag. I may be wrong about this but the Lemmy devs seem to be leaning heavily into authoritarian communism. So left-wing fascists. Not a big fan personally. Anyways, I moved over with some of our very active german community on reddit. I think feddit is one of the bigger instances available :)
I love the community feel of joining an instance related to my identity. There’s something a little romantic to me about exploring the fediverse from my home base of a cute little pod of trans people. And also more practically, I trust in our ability to defederate from the hate. The idea of creating a friendly, welcoming place for queer folks and having the power to sanitize our own space sold me on lemmy/foss/federation instantly.
That’s my favourite thing about the fediverse too.
I found Lemmy through a friend’s recommendation after I deleted my 15yo Reddit account yesterday. I didn’t understand about the decentralization until after I’d signed up on blahaj, but it seems chill so far. I’m very queer but queer spaces make me edgy since they tend to be overwhelmingly white and neoliberal, with all the microaggressions that entails. I’m giving it a shot though.
I stopped using reddit when the blackout started. Only pop on rarely to see updates on the situation. Saw a post talking about alternative trans communities and found my way here!
