In a poll on hexbear (see link), it was observed that there are very few cis women on Lemmy. I think this is the intersection of several problems:
- engagement of women on Reddit was always low
- fewer women in computer science
- I’m hesitant to recommend anything fediversy to people who don’t tinker with computers like I do and thus might need a more handholdy UX.
I gather that transgender people tend to be more into CS, though I don’t see why that explains entirely such an astonishing presence of the transgender community on Hexbear.
Anyway, I just thought I’d open the floor to brainstorming.
i don’t think hexbear is a good sample group for the average lemmy user nor representative of lemmy users a whole. you might do better sampling lemmy.world, or assembling a meta poll from the top 5 or top 10 instances.
I’m a Cis woman on Lemmy. I don’t know what the fuck “hexbear” is. I didn’t vote. Thank you.
Ok, ladies: Would you rather out yourself as a woman online, or spend the night in the woods with a bear?
Anyone thinking that lemmy is a welcoming space to women should read through that thread first.
Edit: the current state of Lemmy and the fediverse reminds me heavily of early reddit, for better and for worse. You can curate some pretty supportive communities if you are careful picking them out, they remain well moderated, etc. But there are plenty of places where you’ll get scummy content if you wander or if posts attract too much attention.
You don’t try and attract a specific demographic. You just create the space you want and if they also value that space you they will choose to participate. It’s not 2005 there are women on the internet everywhere. Lemmy has a lot of women compared to reddit and mastodon has a decent women userbase as well it feels.
Hexbear is a bad representation of lemmy ignore their demographic polls.
As for actionable steps I think we are doing a good enough job already. The communities here are not toxic. The users are mature and call out sexist stuff when it happens. The only thing we could probably do is host more content that women typically tend to enjoy but that will come with growth of the site and is better done organically.
If you’re browsing ‘all’ without any filters there’s still a good portion of porn and porn-like content that’s objectfying and thus probably repelling women.
I think I would swap all usage of “Lemmy” for “Hexbear” in the OP as that instance is not an accurate representation of the whole of Lemmy. Perhaps choosing one of the general Lemmy instances would give a more accurate representation.
Here’s the problem. This is the internet.
These are locally run and often volunteer based instances.
Anyone can spawn any amount of accounts and run their instance however they’d like, giving lots of trolls neat little nooks to hide in.
You’re expecting to get real results? How did you account for multiple votes? How are you even sure that the data from the polls if unique, is accurate?
Garbage in. Garbage out. People will use Lemmy if they want to. End of story. Idk why everyone is so obsessed with inflating user counts
