Ask Lemmy

Mod notice: semi-controversial but serious question has been raised about an actual issue. Keep it civil and stay classy.

If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. Or at least be tastefully funny about it.

EDIT:

"somegroup"-only communities really feels like discrimination to me

Look, I'm not about to post comments myself in those places, but happening upon one recently after a previous post like this, I noticed how poorly the rule was displayed.

Each post should have a stickied mod comment at the top stating commenting is for women only. Otherwise it's easy not to notice what community the post is in that you're responding to, especially on mobile.

You can expect people to know the rules of any community before posting, or take the time to look, or whatever, but the only person you're hurting is yourself for having those expectations.

If your community is public, the onus is on you (or rather, the mods of the community) to make it as clear as possible what the rules are, if they exclude people or go beyond "be civil."

Personally, I block pretty much all exclusionary communities for a few reasons:

• I frequently do not see the community name before looking at a thread and finding something interesting to converse on, partly because of my neurodivergences. This leads to breaking rules without intending to. Safer to block.

• I sometimes have experienced RSD as a symptom of my neurodivergences and thus intentionally take action to prevent it.

• I value inclusivity and anarchic social organization as fundamental parts of my ethical framework and find social exclusion based upon a person's immutable traits incredibly offensive (the intensity of this is definitely related to my neurodivergences as well).

This is not to say that I don't believe that women deserve a space where they have control and agency, especially with the immense amounts of misogyny on the Internet and meatspace. Nor do they need to consider my feelings nor any other man's when deciding their rules and whether to be inclusive or exclusive.

I do, however, think that the hard-line exclusionary practices diminish the perspective, both for the participants and for men who could definitely use the insights into the bullshit that women have to continue to deal with. Lots of missed opportunity to build understanding and strengthen allyship. It also makes it easier for toxic exclusionary ideologies, like TERFs to take root (every group excluded makes it easier to excuse excluding another) while also preventing people who have not discovered their feminine gender identities from participating in conversation with other women in ways that could help them to uncover important things about themselves.

Anyway, enjoy and I hope that you find your space helpful to you, regardless of what myself or any other man feels about it. If the community does become inclusive, I'd definitely like to to know so that I can unblock it.

Honestly the varied mobile platforms don't always present the channel/groups rules in advance. Especially if one is just browsing trending topics. There can potentially be no way for some users to be informed enough before they see a topic they want to interact with.

Best solution I found for similar issue is polite advisement of the rules via dm or other preferred method and helping them learn and have better internet etiquette.

Calling folks out publicly can get alot of negative associations with it as well which might end with you group on the wrong end of a troll.

Why the hell SOME women can't stop generalizing men's behaviour?

What the fuck is wrong with you, guys?

the rules are clearly presented

I use Voyager. Community rules are hidden unless you specifically go to that community page, open the menu, and select "sidebar". It's incredibly easy to miss.

If a community only wants some people posting then a quick fix is to not allow just anyone to post to it.

TIL there is women only spaces on the internet. How do you even enforce it?

That's a bit of an overreaction.

"The rules are clearly presented"

WRONG! Posts show up in aggregate lists. You know, like the main page of lemmy instances. Where individual community rules do not appear at all if someone clicks on the post directly. I bet a significant amount of the time, people do not even realize which community they're replying to posts in.

Don't like it? Maybe Lemmy needs a way to either remove communities from standard aggregate lists, or to force a popup of community rules when a post is navigated to for a first time viewer that hasn't even seen the community page. Then I'd totally understand being pissed off at first time rule violators.

The rules are not clearly presented when you're just scrolling through a generic AllPost feed. I've almost commented to one of these just the other day before realizing at the last second what community it was.

Also, when you're discussing men, especially negatively, and expect men to not jump in to defend themselves, that's a bit naive to think they'll stay out of it. Some of those threads can get really echo chamber and dogpile feeling.

And people would be throwing a shit fit if the genders were reversed here. I'm sure there are some bitter people out there that don't like the double standard. There seems to be a lot of overgeneralization where the bad behavior of a select few gets broadly painted onto the entire gender. This, again, has a double standard of being an acceptable thing to do, to the point that even within this thread someone is mocking others for pointing out "not all men" as a response.