It’s a stat someone provided on c/womensstuff a long time ago when I joined. It’s something I just accepted without investigating further. I don’t remember whether that poster cited any sources, although it might have been from survey I can’t find, so I investigated it last night, anticipating this exact (and justified response).

Certain instances, instances like lemmy.ca, do run demographic surveys. But when I looked at that, it was actually a different number than what I gave. For instance, lemmy.ca’s (to my knowledge) most recent survey put women at 6.4% and men at 87.8%. Now, there are inevitable methodological flaws due to the nature of lemmy being a federated platform. ca’s survey had 513 participants, which is about half the sample size you’d want for a proportion to be representative of a population. But even if we had a sample size of 1000, it still probably wouldn’t be representative of all of lemmy, because I would assume Beehaw and Blahaj have a higher proportion of women and nonbinary people while many of the other instances would be mostly men.

That being said, just given the posts I regularly see on lemmy and the commenters on there, I would assume – with an unknown margin of error – that lemmy.ca is somewhat representative of lemmy, in that there is some male majority on the platform. It just makes sense because early adopted technology tends to be mostly male and most of the comments I see appear to be from men.

Because it’s hard or even impossible to prove a negative (my assertion that women aren’t an ultraminority on lemmy), I realize how easy it is to pick apart and dismiss my core argument based on my estimate of the number alone. And I don’t really have any recourse to this when data is as limited as it is. Initial signs point to the platform being a supermajority of men, but I could definitely be wrong.

Feel free to reply and contribute to the discourse, but I’m going to mute this thread and take a break from lemmy for a while. There’s such a vocal (likely) majority who are so offended by the idea of women having one community to call their own. I don’t think I’ll ever convince the folks here why I think c/womensstuff has the right to exist in its current form, and they’ll never convince me. Discussions on c/witchesvspatriarchy constantly get brigaded and go off-topic to the point where it’s often not usable as it was originally intended, and womensstuff would become that too if it allowed male commenters. If the mods change the roles or if other instances defederate Blahaj over “segregation,” there’s nothing I can really do about that and I’d probably just be done with internet forums at this point.

I’m remembering how I left Reddit in the first place because of how toxic those communities could get, and how comparatively harmonious lemmy is. That’s still the case, but I’m tired over all the discourse toward this one community – it’s a reoccuring thing – and I’m actively making things worse by continuing to debate people over when there’s no way one group will ever successfully convince the other.

Replies like this make me wish Lemmy let you give people Gold like Reddit.

It isn’t all or nothing, though. No one is taking away co-ed discussion groups. It’s okay that you think it’s boring, but it’s another thing to argue that single-gender spaces should not exist due to those personal preferences.

Both can exist. Both is good. :)

That’s interesting, and I do think the ally-welcoming queer spaces are a good idea too. My thought after reading this goes like this: Can spaces that are welcoming to allies coexist with spaces where only people within a group are allowed to contribute? Like, is it an all or nothing thing?

This is key because there are other spaces on lemmy (witchesvspatriarchy) that are both women-centric and open to allies. But c/witchesvspatriarchy is constantly brigaded by male Lemmy users who get defensive. Often the top upvoted comments will be defensive ones from men, and many posts get derailed from their original topics. It can feel really discouraging. So guys on Lemmy regularly can and do step out of line, and Lemmy’s ecosystem rewards them for it because there’s more of them than us.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad witchesvspatriarchy exists. It’s healthy for ally-friendly women-centric spaces to exist. But I’m also glad there’s a community where I don’t have to deal with the constant derailing. And due to the specific circumstances of this platform, it feels like not allowing comments from men is the only to achieve that. At the end of the day, I’m glad that both exist. And I feel like if women-only spaces were taken away from Lemmy, I would just leave.

Edit: There’s another component to this as well, the idea you expressed that you felt excluded either because of your gender or because you’re an ally, and you don’t want anyone to feel like that. I don’t want to presume about your life or identity, but I’m a trans woman and I lived through being excluded because people thought I was a man. It was really awful, honestly. When I was in the closet, I would present as a woman on the internet because it was the one place I didn’t have to reveal my appearance. It was the only time for the entirety of my childhood and adolescence that I felt seen. I guess what I’m saying is that closet trans people aren’t the people being excluded from single-gender spaces on the internet – I certainly wasn’t. I don’t think a “no men” policy in internet forums affected me at all.

I don’t think my experience can or should be directly compared with those of male allies. There are some women-centered spaces where women will gladly welcome mens’ input, but in others, we’re asking for men to respect our right to gather independently, and I don’t think that’s unreasonable to ask. And it’s a boundary men have the right to ask of women too.

When men make up 97.5% of Lemmy’s overall traffic, yes, literally this but non-sarcastically. If women make posts in women-focused communities and the posts get overrun by men and the women get downvoted and dogpiled in their own communities, do you think they’re just going to stay on Lemmy?

No, they’re going back to Reddit where there are enough women users to have an on-topic conversation that doesn’t immediately get derailed.

Hey, go for it! If c/mensliberation became men-only, I’d support them! There are some communities where women wouldn’t have anything to contribute, and that’s okay and wouldn’t be sexist.

But just don’t go full kiwifarms with a men-only community and I’d say that’s fine.

The community you’re complaining about actually allows trans and nonbinary people. I believe you can acknowledge the value of single-gender+enby spaces while being critical of single-sex spaces without being a TERF.

Right now women make up 2.5% of the overall Lemmy userbase. They’re more likely to be downvoted and dogpiled by the remaining 97.5% of Lemmy in coed spaces. If we want Lemmy to grow and be open for everyone, for now we need women-only communities so we can create positive associations with the platform where we can express our opinions freely without worry about being brigaded. If womens’ spaces on Lemmy were open to men, it would be majority men commenting on all of those posts, and our voices would get drowned out. Most or all of us would get fed up and leave. The thing is, if you don’t allow protections for women, you still end up with segregation.

So there’s an important crossroads that we need to decide. Do we allow X-exclusive communities in the hopes of building up Lemmy and the Fediverse? Or do we defederate instances with communities that support minority communities, and accept the inevitability that Lemmy will continue to be a male-only space for good?

Maybe the exclusivity can be eased when the gender gap gets closed more. I know it feels unfair on the surface. For now I’ll say if c/menslib’s moderators decided the community would be men-only, I’d support that.

But if you do that, every community will be men-only because all the women will have left 🙃

Use a dumbphone and hold onto a smartphone to use only when necessary. I have a Sunbeam F1 Pro for daily use. And I have a Moto G Power, purchased used, that I use maybe once every other week for bike maps, public transit, and restaurant QR codes. I’m hoping with how amazing the battery is that will last until 5G inevitably gets phased out. I was using FOSS apps with that, but I’ll just go back to the App Store. Post-DOGE, my threat model doesn’t require degoogling anymore.

Maybe eventually I’ll move to GrapheneOS, provided it finds a way to exist without using Google products and services. I have high hopes for Ubuntu Touch in the 2030s.

For me it’s less about finding a new daily driver and more about limiting the time spent on an Android phone.