There used to be, but it was mostly men commenting, and mostly men upvoting, which drowns out any actual women’s voices that may have been there.

Pretty sure all the woman-focused subs have shut down.

I don’t really think there’s anything that can be done other than policing your own and letting the platform grow.

It’s a whole vibe thing, not just obvious stuff.

For example, whenever there were questions aimed at women (hey ladies, what’s your hair routine? Sort of thing), it’s nothing but a bunch of men spouting off about what their wives or girlfriends do, and maybe a few actual women, but their comments always ended up buried. Nobody actually wants that “the woman in my life does this, I think…” sort of input at all, except other men (which unfortunately is the vast majority of the platform, so those “as a man” comments get heavily upvoted, even when they are obviously full of complete shit). It drowns out the few female voices that actually are around. And if you correct some dude in a post for women voices, about something men typically know nothing about, you’ll get heavily downvoted for it. Not at all welcoming.

I know we have some strong transfem comms, and I’m all for it because all women are women, but the experience of those women is wildly different from cis women, and a lot of the memes and stuff coming from those comms are sort of… cis-excluding and often very off-putting. Which is sort of the only fem representation on here.

It’s just not friendly for women. And so so many things need to change before it really is.

I only mention Lemmy as a caution, like what to avoid, while I’m mentioning other fediverse social media…

Because I’m a woman and most of the people I know who want social media alternatives are also women, and I’m not subjecting them to this shitshow. I like them too much to bring them here.

I tried to sign up for an account, I was going to use it to create long form content, so I picked some tags (which definitely leave out too many broad categories to be particularly useful, and is thus incredibly limiting) that seemed somewhat related to what I wanted to do.

I then looked through the instance list based on those tags, and tried to find one that fit… and I couldn’t, because all of them had some caveat or blurb or whatever that made me go “nope, probably not here…”

The problem is that I had to click through multiple pages to hit those caveats in the instance rules/description during the signup process, and I had to do it for every one I wanted to check out. They weren’t at all listed on the main page, and they probably should be, maybe under a popup tooltip sort of button. As it stands it was a huge waste of time, and I gave up, and lost interest in having a channel. Maybe I’ll browse it if it ever picks up, but frankly the process of signing up to be a content creator is far too onerous.

Maybe that’s a problem with the instance owners and how they have things set up, maybe with the way the whole platform works, I don’t really know. It was pretty consistent though, so I assume it’s a platform problem.

It’s so depressing and aggressive, honestly. I can’t do that to my friends who don’t do that already.

These concerns, and more, are why just today, during a conversation with some friends looking to get off traditional social media, I advised them to join pixelfed, peer tube, mastodon, and loops, but suggested they strictly avoid Lemmy.

The communities aren’t right for anyone who isn’t seeking something exactly like Lemmy or leftie-Reddit-lite. I don’t even really like it here all that much anymore. Not the content; the interactions… across all my accounts… even joining “nicer” spaces is not a particularly nice or pleasant experience, plus the more interested is a woman, and Lemmy is a horrible sausagefest echo chamber not at all suited to a normal average woman person who isn’t techie. I’m techie, so I’m used to the vibe, but for your average cis-woman, Lemmy is a very very bad fit.

Bring on the downvotes if you like (the echo-chamber anti-voice sentiment is part of why people shouldn’t be recommended this platform, after all) but these are legit concerns for people who may want to join, and those of us already here can and do steer people elsewhere as a result.