(Content warning, discussions of SA and misogyny, mods I might mention politics a bit but I hope this can be taken outside the context of politics and understood as a discussion of basic human decency)
We all know how awful Reddit was when a user mentioned their gender. Immediate harassment, DMs, etc. It’s probably improved over the years? But still awful.
Until recently, Lemmy was the most progressive and supportive of basic human dignity of communities I had ever followed. I have always known this was a majority male platform, but I have been relatively pleased to see that positive expressions of masculinity have won out.
All of that changed with the recent “bear vs man” debacle. I saw women get shouted down just for expressing their stories of being sexually abused, repeatedly harassed, dogpiled, and brigaded with downvotes. Some of them held their ground, for which I am proud of them, but others I saw driven to delete their entire accounts, presumably not to return.
And I get it. The bear thing is controversial; we can all agree on this. But that should never have resulted in this level of toxicity!
I am hoping by making this post I can kind of bring awareness to this weakness, so that we can learn and grow as a community. We need to hold one another accountable for this, or the gender gap on this site is just going to get worse.
True, there are some people that just downvote everything, for no reason. I get that. I guess what made me worry was the fact that I had comments in Lemmy News telling me they hope I get raped with a rusty lawn mower blade, followed by someone downvoting all of my past comments in succession after that comment. I figured it was the person who made that comment.
Curious if you reported them?
If so, did you check the mod log to see if they were banned? Did the offending comment get removed?
Personally I would say that’s happening to you, sure. I’ve experienced something similar, over something much more trivial than what you’ve experienced.
Apparently it’s someone’s personal mission in life to try to maintain their version of ‘order and peace’ on Lemmy, through their singular actions.
Anti Commercial-AI license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
I did report it. I should check to see if it was removed. Honestly, I haven’t thought about it much. I have had other things to do, and it just wasn’t on my mind lately.