Lemmy is barely a thing. Lets not get ahead of ourselves.

People do prefer centralized platforms with shiny front-faces and easy-to-navigate corporate bullshit. The reason why that stuff is so successful is because it works.

People fled to Bluesky because advertisers moved to Bluesky.

But maybe some kind of resilience to the forces of destruction plaguing commercial social media.

This isn’t going to be the effective slogan that turns the masses who are finally just barely starting to fill Bluesky.

As soon as any platform sees a measure of success, it becomes a product and thus vulnerable. If we want social media that isn’t just a massive propaganda and advertising machine, I feel like we need to change something else.

Like physically storming corporate offices and returning the means of production to the people?

Maybe.

I am not a woman but I have many female friends and family members and a partner who talk about the things they deal with, so let me give a few examples of things you may deal with as a woman online or off, in increasing levels of severity and threat level:

• Being condescended to and ignored, talked over and interrupted constantly.
• Being excluded from things and patronized for wanting to talk about certain topics or activities.
• Guys who cannot stop making sexual advances and sexual comments and have to try to steer every conversation towards sex. Always cracking sexual jokes towards women and looking for a response.
• Getting sent dick pics and other pornographic imagery without prompt or reason.
• Guys in gaming groups or discord servers who act friendly and slowly become more and more obsessive and threatening and feel entitled to your attention.
• Men who fully act normal and decent and integrate into a social group but have secret obsessive impulses and they try to spread rumors and lies about the woman or women in their circle, creating stories to try to isolate the girl they’re interested in, or attempts to get the female members of the group ejected because they feel insecure around them.
• Men who can’t distinguish between being friends and being intimate, and suddenly feel like they’re your boyfriend and entitled to know everything you do and everywhere you go, making threats to harm themselves or you if you don’t reciprocate the “relationship.”
• Stalkers who find your personal information online and send you pictures from your social media or other personal items to show that they know where you live.
• Being followed home or stalked by actual people who find out who you are.

There are a lot of social “rules” that women have to deal with, and a lot of men aren’t even aware of them. Like how they never leave drinks unattended when out with friends. When being dropped off at their house, they ask the driver to wait until they get all the way inside with the door closed before the driver leaves.

I often hesitate to give these kinds of examples because invariably there will be someone who claims it’s all lies or exaggerated, or they dismiss it and say “I wish I got that kind of attention online!” and other mind-meltingly dense, stupid or aggressive takes. This is why I asked if you have talked to real women you know about their experiences, because they don’t talk about this stuff, particularly online to people they aren’t close to. As soon as you get close to any women you learn exactly how much sexual predation they endure their whole lives and yeah, they do “get used it” in that they don’t go around telling everyone about every interaction. 1 out of 5 women are raped or have been assaulted/attempted rape. Of these victims, 1 out of 3 had it happen between ages of 11 and 17.

Most women who are murdered are murdered by a spouse, boyfriend, acquaintance or someone who met them once or twice.

Women have very good reason to feel afraid of strangers, online or off, if you’re actually interested in learning more and reading actual examples there is a WEALTH of information online and plenty of women’s stories on major forums, from Lemmy to Reddit to twitter threads.

There are a lot of things you probably aren’t even aware of that are normal for women, I would really encourage you to broaden your social sphere and make friends of other genders and backgrounds and listen to what other people deal with.

You probably don’t even know how much harassment and threats you would face just being a woman online, it’s not exaggerated, there are a LOT of people who really enjoy making women feel unsafe, it’s a game to them. Most girls I know hide their identities online and pretend to be men. Imagine not being able to express yourself freely even on the internet because you don’t want to feel unsafe or hated.

We’re in free-fall right now, but kind of like the market when a recession begins, we don’t see it until it’s in hindsight. But right now it’s already in full swing, whatever people meant about the “singularity” it’s already happening, because we have no idea what’s going to happen next, predictive models are toast. We used to be able to predict the future out to the decade with ideas about politics, technology and society being extrapolated with fairly good accuracy.

We can’t predict what’s going to happen next month now. Even our so-called leadership has just abandoned all semblance of control and appearances of normalcy and are just trying to get as much as they can as fast as they can before it all collapses.

I don’t think we’re going to lose everything. We’re going to have some hardships and a LOT of people are going to suffer. And likely there will be deaths at a scale that grows so steadily and so long-term that we’re all going to collectively tune out the news. Again. I just don’t know what’s going to be built on the other side. It will either be solar panels and servers and robot factories, or it will be death machines and tools of darkness. (And server farms and robot factories, but meant for like… mulching brown people who still have oil and water.)

This is a really, really scary time right now, if there was ever a time to know a general, baseline level of fear, it would be now. We’re entering a world where it’s really hard to tell what’s real, but we’re a population of creatures with brains designed by the last Ice Age and as a result, all our brains do is tell stories to make explanations for how we feel.

These brains are woefully inadequate for relating to a world with several huge, complicated issues intersecting, from technology/AI, to climate change, to political instability and misinformation.

I’ve been around a few, I’m getting up there in years. And I have NEVER seen a world more lost and confused and embattled in issues we’re incapable of sorting out as individuals. And it’s all going to get so much worse before it gets better.

Yah, you’re not alone, but you also can’t sit on your hands. Seriously, save money, put dry or preserved food away, bury some cash or gold. Learn to cook and shoot, get your passport updated, have a go-bag.

Within the next 10 - 20 years we’re going to have a global instability like we’ve never seen. Half of all animals will be facing potential endangerment, oceans will have a harder and harder time sustaining yields and the fresh-water problem is going to be a full-on emergency in many places. And on top of all this, we will have dictators and little tyrants throwing missiles at each other left and right, old alliances will crumble, wars will stack on wars, and machines will start thinking like people and controlling our weapons and our world. I have no idea what’s going to happen but I want everyone to be ready. America in particular hasn’t known the hardships of forced migration and famine and war and artillery barrages, so people here are going to have a hard time adjusting to how tough things may get.

Our species has a lot more vulnerabilities in our minds and hearts than we really want to admit to even ourselves… but there are wicked people who do know about them, and they will try everything to pry those vulnerabilities open and make us feel things so our brains latch onto stories to explain those feelings.

We have to be constantly wary of anyone who says things that make us feel powerful emotions, no matter who or where, this our future battleground. The next world-war will be waged internally.

(And with missiles too of course.)

Have you ever really talked to women who use online spaces a lot? Like a real conversation, face-to-face or in person. Serious question.

edit: the soft chirping of distant crickets provide me all the answers I need.

Okay now lets change it again.

“Are there any Lemmy communities FOR rape survivors and by rape survivors?”

And someone says “Well why do you want to create division? Shouldn’t rapists also have a chance to share their side?”

I’m not saying this is a realistic “turn the tables” but neither is yours. I will explain why.

Right now, despite whatever stupid fucking propaganda a select few assholes are hung up on, there are no systemic attacks happening on white people just for being white. At least none of any value or meaning. No, fringe groups don’t count because they don’t have power and never will have power in this system. However there ARE in fact many white-nationalist groups that ARE gaining power and voice, and attempting to return to an old hegemonic ideal of race. This isn’t a “that’s not fair!” issue, this is an issue about our very future as a diverse species sharing a world together.

I don’t think there should be ANY exclusionary spaces, but I do think there should be well-moderated spaces for people of similar ideas or demographics to share thoughts without being attacked for their identity. There should be spaces where people know they will be ejected for trying to sabotage the conversations.

Division and segregation hurts all of us, and if we want to fight it, we have to fight the fuckers who drive people to want to escape, we have to fight the trolls and monsters and bullies and nazis who make people feel afraid. Those are the ones trying to divide us, and those are the ones we shouldn’t be giving voice to.

I can’t tell if your question is in good faith or not because of how awkwardly it’s worded, but if you’re asking how women can feel uncomfortable online, you’re obviously not a woman, so enjoy that I guess.

It’s a more niche “back room” kind of forum, so there are less casual browsers and more technerds here, which makes it predominantly male for a lot of reasons that require a whole other discussion to analyse, but it’s exactly like when reddit was a niche “back room” website gaining popularity.

Lets not forget when reddit started, it was absolute chaos, some of the very worst communities imaginable where at home there, and the userbase RAGED every time some pedo or hate sub got purged. But they did get purged, and it became welcoming for a more diverse group of users to participate in. (Until the bot nation attacked)

Ask the people who deliberately work to make shared spaces uncomfortable for particular groups of people.

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I’m convinced that the majority of our population do not give a flying fuck about representation or leadership and just participate in democracy when they’re seeking emotional validation.

The problem with this is that the most emotional ones in need of the most validation are the ones who would vote in literal Reincarnated Vampire Turbo Hitler Khan if it triggers the other side.

you’re getting loads of downvotes, but I honestly think it’s mostly from people who feel called-out on some level that we all, as a society, have long abandoned wanting better outcomes and just want emotional validation.

This is the trick that Russia and other entities amplified in our social media spaces and forums, the raw emotions and anger that leaves people making choices based on feelings rather than solid understanding of politics.

I mean, it’s too late now, it all worked and got people so distracted that we let the coyote in to guard the henhouse. But I mean, ideally yah we would need to put some better effort into separating how we feel from what we really want. That ship has sailed a long time ago, leftists are as delusional as the right now, but in a different direction. RIP democracy.

YES! I TOO MINDLESSLY HATE ELECTRIC CARS!

IF PEOPLE START ALL GOING ELECTRIC I WILL BE SO MAD I WILL RENOUNCE KARL MARX AND START EATING MEAT AND RETURN MY HAIR TO NORMAL COLORING

I SURE HOPE THEY DON’T START BUILDING NUCLEAR PLANTS

Okay forget rails, we put big fucking monster-truck tires on the trains and just crash through the countryside.

The giant, gaping flaw in your idea is that it requires leftists to all rally together and cooperate on a unified plan and actually work together.

I don’t think any of this is even real to them. The same way that a majority of the white-nationalist 4-channers are just roleplaying and losing themselves in the storylines, as a species we tend to do that, we just get lost in a narrative because it explains how we feel.

The tankies are doing the same exact thing. They’re not impacting policy, they’re not marching for anything, they’re not taken seriously and it’s just another in-club that has its own language and imagery and secret handshakes and a unifying message to rally behind (America bad!) and instead of turning that criticism into actionable plans for changing representation and making anything better, they put on WW2 Russian Tanker helmets and have erotic fantasies about a communist uprising that will never happen.