Community-wise there’s !WomensStuff@lazysoci.al
Meaning there isn’t an instance for women, nor are there multiple communities - as far as I know there’s just this one community.
lemmy.blahaj.zone has a decent amount of women and both their admins are women, it’s not a “women’s space” as one would describe since everyone is welcome there but it’s probably the closest thing one would describe as an instance “by women for women”. I am obligated to mention that it is a queer instance and that many of the women there are either trans themselves or strongly supportive of trans people, and do not tolerate transphobia or anti-LGBT sentiment (including refusal to support LGBTQ people) at all.
As much as I appreciate the community and users at Blahaj, in my personal experience, the moderation was fairly wanting. At least a year or two ago (not sure about now), they tolerated some pretty freakish right-wing people who enabled chasers and other weird shit on their communities.
We all pretend that it didn’t exist and do not acknowledge its presence; that’s the informal rule.
Yeah Spinster is generally considered a hate site, and consequently is very widely defederated, even from general purpose instances like lemmy.world. Also it’s less of a Reddit alternative and more of a Twitter alternative but is technically redundant since you can do everything you did on there on the real thing instead.
Lemmy has an undeniable woman problem that it carried over from Reddit. I’ve lost count of the number of pathetic blokes that I have blocked on here for anti feminism.
yep it’s pretty horrible. any time gender issues are brought up there’s dozens of comments saying “what about the men” and completely missing the point
The response to “what about men” comments is, we’re already talking about men when we talk about misogyny. Misandry and misogyny are the exact same problem, strictly enforced gender roles. If you deviate, you are punished. The men that are caregivers are derided just like the women that refuse to rear children. Every other related paradigm punches down into the people who do not conform. Stoicism in men, histrionics in women.
Either is a foil for the other and it’s exactly the same bullshit.
As a guy, I do recognise that men are disadvantaged in many areas and need to be put on equal footing with women-- like courts disproportionately award custody of children to mothers, regardless of how unfit the mother is to be a caregiver. But broadly speaking from my pespective, women are still at more disadvantage. I used to live in a bad part of my city for many years and have had little to no issues. However, it is a different story from women I spoke who got harrased, and another hit on the head. They said they will avoid going to the city ever again. I remember sharing the accounts of these women to other men, and the men were surprised because their experience is the complete opposite. Women are still seen as weak. And in the corporate hierarchy, men (of tall statures) disproportionately make up the board of directors and executive roles.
The court thing is not universally true. I worked in a family law firm for several years, and the practice in the courts here is to start from a baseline of equal custody and placement, and I’ve heard the same about other states. The men who lost out were the ones who wouldn’t fight, because they were convinced that the courts were biased. But hell, in one case, we got full custody and placement for a guy whose son wasn’t even biologically his! (His wife cheated, and he didn’t find out until well after they’d emotionally bonded.)
yep. the difference is, when women have been disadvantaged they tend to create spaces and pathways to talk about or change it. unfortunately a lot of men tend to isolate, even though they are not alone. then when they see something about a women receiving help through programs created by women for women their feelings of being abandoned by the system come up again. it’s just another way that toxic masculinity hurts everyone. the fix for that is of course feminism, but it’s a pretty massive barrier for most men to accept that.
Man, I have been in SO MANY internet arguments where I am simultaneously arguing against a woman that yes, men have problems, while also arguing against a man that no, those problems are not worse on the whole than women have.
Back when the whole “bear in the woods” thing was going around misogynists would try to jump in and support me.
Woman: “all men are rapists”
Me: “that’s insulting and hurtful and misandrist, and also not even close to true”
Misogynist: “Yeah! And also women are heartless bitches!”
Me: “I don’t remember asking YOU a goddamn thing”
EDIT: Look at the responses to this comment for the proof.
100%
It’s really bad and lemmy is really in denial.
Sexism here is much worse than it was on Reddit.
It feels like 2008 Reddit here sexism wise, except instead of Ron Paul libertarians tooting their horns everywhere we have heavy tracked vehicle enthusiasts.
I did hope lemmy having a left leaning culture would help but it does not.
Try making any post that focuses on situations uniquely or disproportionally experienced by women and you get mostly “everyone has that why think about women” or “what about men” or “men have it worst” responses.
Oh yea? One time I got kicked in the balls and it kinda hurt. Women have it soooo easy.
But the fact that the majority (or perhaps less than half now) of the responses literally prove the point I am trying to make proves my point downvotes or not.
You have to remember the people who would literally unironically make such a post that proves my post are the densest of the dense.
Most sexists, while dense, are less dense than a black hole and would not prove my point for me under such a post.
Some instances have a left-leaning culture. Lemmy.world definitively does not.
Try making any post that focuses on situations uniquely or disproportionally experienced by women and you get mostly “what about men” or “men have it worst” responses.
that’s kind of just how controversial things are on the internet though.
Evens shitposting from men will get similar responses from women, it’s just how it is now. Sort of always has been.
THIS. EXACTY THIS RIGHT HERE. THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT I MEAN.
Me: talks about issue disproportionately affecting women.
Lemmy User: It’s not really about women. Everyone suffers from this.
This seems like a very good niche for someone willing to do it. Problematic accounts could get a site-wide ban instead of each woman having to ban someone herself.
Unfortunately it is niche right now in the fediverse based on the stats. That could change but probably requires a different approach to achieve.
I would guess that most women wouldn’t feel the need to be on a woman-focused Lemmy instance for their main / only account. But, some might want an alt account to discuss certain things there.
While this won’t be the case with everyone, it was mentioned a few times in a post I made here a long while back
I’m a woman, and make no attempt to hide that fact in my posts. That said, I also don’t personally have much interest in talking about being a woman, so don’t sub to any of those places you linked.
Over on Reddit I just sort of let people assume I was male a lot of the time, since it wasn’t really relevant to what we were talking about. But from the start on Lemmy I’ve made sure to call out incorrect assumptions, downvote and give a talking to people stereotyping or being misogynistic, etc etc. And the more of us (of all genders) that make that same decision, the better things get
I don’t know of any “men only” instances, the fact that it’s gender-specific is niche rather than the specific gender.
Same reason womens magazines are more popular than mens magazines and womens subreddits and websites are more popular than mens.
Maybe one day we’ll have full equality and it’ll be weird to think of “women’s spaces” as something that’s necessary. But it’s very much so today.
Zero women have tried to make one so far regardless of how many would use a new instance. So it can’t be all that in demand.
I think it naturally would occur if Lemmy grows in size. There’s not many people here to begin with.
There’s !WomensStuff@lazysoci.al we started a little over a month ago and recently hit 1000 members
this is a bit of how Blahaj works as I understand it, so it’s a good model - if anything I would think Blahaj might already be poised for this kind of instance-level protection of women
EDIT:
one of the Blahaj guidelines does include removing bigotry, including sexism, and would be a candidate for a safe space for women:
Inclusion and Acceptance
Embracing inclusion and acceptance means listening when people tell you who they are and what their needs are. It means not telling people that you know their experiences better than they do. It means not gatekeeping experiences of identities of others. It means no bigotry such as racism, sexism, anti LGBT commentary, ableism etc. It means doing your best to ensure that you don’t over-talk the voices of folk who don’t share your privileges.
That said, the women spaces on Blahaj are mostly for trans women, so a more general women’s community would be nice.
Youre absolutely welcome to join Blahaj zone. Our wonderful administration team (both of whom are women) bans misogyny whenever it comes around to our communities. The mods for our main communities share a very aggressive moderation policy.
They also ban real users instead of the people literally calling their gender “dragonfucker” and “attack helicopter”
There were a bunch of users who got angry about these users mocking gender expression and then when they told the trolls to fucking stop Ada banned them
The blahaj admins are trolls
I give Ada a lot of credit. In the early days, I had the following interaction:
TOPIC: Something about sexual/gender preferences, I don’t remember, asking people their preferences
Me: responds with my preferences (I’m straight cis male, I like women so I’m down with post-transition trans women but pre-transition don’t turn me on)
Some random user: respectfully asks if I would be willing to date a pre-transition trans man
Me: I guess, but it probably wouldn’t work due to the fact that what I like about their body, they hate
Some of those professionally offended people took a misleading screenshot of my response and started screaming about “chasers”.
Ada did an admin post to the community backing me up and calling those idiots out.
So unless she’s changed a lot, I don’t think she’s a troll. It would have been easy to go with the mob but she stuck up for me.
Still could be TERFS.
I don’t have any deeper knowledge of that instance, just what I saw in all, so I don’t want to put anything on them. That thought just came across reading your comment.
I have made a mental remark in the past that the posts and users on this instance are better treated from afar, though.
The pronoun was just “drag”. PJ is the one who kept calling them “dragonfucker”. You can go read dragonriders comments instead of just repeating gossip.
“dragonfucker” and “attack helicopter”
i mean, if they’re doing it as a haha funny, i see no harm, but if they’re also being assholes, i think that takes precedent. You aren’t legally required to fill in your gender tagging appropriately so.
They are an asshole though, a serial pot stirring drama seeking troll that gets people banned for reacting to their ragebait. Yeah I identify as a refurbished ebike and you must relearn English to refer to me, and you only rather not because you agree with literal genocide. Funny!
I haven’t seen the attack helicopter and the joke is pretty damn old tbh, but drag at least is/was kinda funny. Drag’s profile specified that drag’s pronoun is “drag” in not just third, but also first and second person, which is an interesting concept. Drag also stayed in character in drag’s posts. Drag didn’t ever really bother people with the whole thing IMO.
also our wonderful admin kaity did what the lemmy devs couldn’t and nuked the dm spam :)
It really seems like instance admins tend to do a much better job with a lot of stuff on here than the core devs. Its a shame that forking would take as much work as it would.
As much as I appreciate the community and users, there are (or at least were) serious moderation problems on Blahaj, I did not feel safe there when I tried it a year or two ago.
I definitely cannot agree. I encourage anyone who has any issues with moderation to make a post in the Blahaj meta community. Ada and Kaity have been spectacular and have responded to every issue I have come across. There are limits, they can’t preemptively prevent any kind of moderation issue but they respond quickly.
