Hi comrades, want to give you all an informal update on the discussions around the site’s misogyny problems that’ve been happening over the last several days. I wanna make sure you know that the admin/mod team has seen all of that discourse and we’ve been actively discussing solutions in the matrix mod chat. We’re taking this shit very seriously and acknowledge that we haven’t used a heavy enough hand on misogynistic rhetoric. As some of you saw we nuked that cheating thread from a couple weeks ago and handed out temp bans to the most egregious offenders. Idk how that was allowed to run it’s course but we apologize for that oversight. We’re going to do better.

We’ve come up with some ideas for how to improve this part of the site culture and we want to get suggestions from y’all as well, since the alarm was sounded on this by our beautiful c/traa posters to begin with. Our ideas so far include:

  1. A zero-tolerance policy towards any even remotely misogynistic/patriarchal posts or comments, as too much has slipped through the cracks on that, establishing a clear protocol for bans for violating rules against misogyny, and ideally tracking repeat offenders in a way that makes deciding a course of action easy when they reoffend.

  2. Uphold TC69 thought by starting up a book club (and hopefully more to follow) on feminist theory and encouraging mass participation, particularly from the he/him’s on the site. “The Will to Change” by bell hooks has been suggested by multiple people as a great starting point but please feel free to suggest any other works.

  3. Relaunching /c/menby with a trusted educated mod team and a specific focus on countering mainstream narratives about masculinity, relationships and sex that breed reactionary, patriarchal attitudes

  4. Encouraging [namely femme] participation in /c/womenby and taking steps to revitalize that sub as an excellent source of discussion on feminism and intersectionality

  5. Holding another mod drive to get more folks into mod positions in our communities who can help weed out reactionary attitudes

  6. Encouraging users to use the report button often on any post that seems even remotely sus, with the promise that no one’s going to be punished for “report abuse” for reporting posts in obvious good faith

Please let me know your thoughts on the above or any other ideas you have for making the site better, safer and more inclusive for our femme comrades. Once we’ve fully hammered out plans and updated policy we plan to make an announcement post highlighting these changes for the whole userbase. Thank you all for being here and being who you are feminism trans-heart

  • kristina [she/her]@hexbear.netM
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    2 months ago

    its more that i think showing a united group is better right now for drawing more trans people, i can point at the trans mega and say ‘look it has 2k comments every week, join in!’ and its been successful at bringing more people. trans users here have fairly high activity but that amounts to usually around 120-150 posters (re: as in actually making comments and interacting) on traa each week. take 2/3rds of those comments away and it means less interaction/solidarity between enbies/binary trans and it might even kill off the binary trans community here (40 active posters is not very much)

    also i have a desire to centralize trans places generally because it makes it easier to find people that need help. just an issue with mutual aid projects i and others have been working on, we often find we’ve responded too late for someone needing help which is… very bad oftentimes (i have so many horror stories about this that keep me up at night) and theres no way to fix it beyond centralizing all methods of communication and speeding up the game of telephone trans people do to find help. it may not be 100% pertinent to this conversation but i just wanted to mention it. i have a list of subscriptions that i check here which somewhat remedies that issue but i often miss people needing help even in the current megathread, much less needing to check several.

    • belligerentkitten [they/them, it/its]@hexbear.netM
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      2 months ago

      but you have a bunch of nonbinary people saying we feel alienated by not having a space to talk about the things we’d like to talk about. for all we know it might lead to more enby participation in the mega because we feel more confident knowing we’re not the only ones. i certainly don’t see an enby comm as an alternative to participation in the unified community.

      i’d consider volunteering to mod it (tho not alone) if it would help with moderation issues.

      • kristina [she/her]@hexbear.netM
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        2 months ago

        I’m ultimately down with whatever everyone wants to do I’m mostly just voicing my unease/trauma about splitting groups and lines of communication. If we keep it all still together some way rather than splitting threads or something that would be best.

        I honestly kinda even hate the Fediverse because of its tendency to split queer groups, but recognize its probably the least shit noncorporate way to run things for queers. I also am kinda sad that people want to even make a separate spot, I feel like I’ve put in a lot of effort to make sure enbies felt welcome here, I really wanted to make a place that avoided the typical splitting. kitty-birthday-sad

        • belligerentkitten [they/them, it/its]@hexbear.netM
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          2 months ago

          i don’t feel unwelcome. and it’s not a here thing either. it’s a consistent problem i’ve had with trans communities for the past 15 years. and in many cases it’s been downright harmful and segregated and thats not what its like here. but that doesn’t mean that i don’t feel like, incredibly different to the vast majority of trans people. and it can be harder to find ur voice in a community when u feel that way. and i had no idea that there were at least several other people here who feel the same, which is kinda the whole reason i would love an enby community. you’re not doing anything wrong and i’m sorry i made u feel that way.

        • robot_dog_with_gun [they/them]@hexbear.net
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          2 months ago

          transfem content is so prolific it can squeeze some of the rest of us out sometimes that don’t share those issues or experiences, so a separate subforum seems warranted… if people are gonna use it. i don’t have a better idea bit i don’t have pressing agender issues i’m dying to talk about, maybe the gender having enbys do