Lemmy has a problem
With the recent issues of Tea (teaforwomen.com) posting unsecured user data, it's easy to spot the heavy bias of male users in the comments. With a 90% male demographic, Lemmy will face problems related to a homogeneous user population and all the issues that come with it. Right now, it's shaping up to be misogynistic, but it could also head into other bad places. Lemmy needs to attract a more diverse population of users or will end up as another echo chamber for the like minded. https://www.similarweb.com/website/lemmy.ml/#demographics
34 replies
You're talking about a specific instance Lemmy.ml which isn't even the biggest instance, but basically a tankie instance.
You should at least bring together the data of the biggest top 10 instances.
I also wonder how that website decides if I'm male or female.
If you haven't outright stated female then you're obviously male. Probably even then too because there are no girls on the internet. Duh.
TheY dId tHE rEseaRCH
I'd say there's a lot bigger problems with .ml's user base than what that site is looking at too...
.ml is the r/conservative of the left
Not fair, conservatives show up to vote and therefore get more of their agenda done. Those tankies would leave us all for dead as long as it they keep their perceived purity.
Too true
Marx said democracy is a tool for the bourgeois /s
And yet the tankies argue DPRK and CCP are democracies...
Still, minimizing harm is helpful to growing our progressive movements.
Wouldn’t a tankie instance have more women?
Your response seems almost defensive, which is weird. Lemmy is definitely overwhelming male. That’s not an inherently bad thing, so I don’t get the defensive tone here or taking OP to task about data methods.
Disagree all you want, but this website is incredibly male dominated. I don’t think OP needs to do a peer-reviewed, double-blind study to say so.
Why are you so aggressively defending a false data collection method?
And what do you mean by "this website"?
How do you track gender category when it is not listed or asked anywhere on the forums?
Rule 30 of internet: https://archive.org/stream/RulesOfTheInternet/RulesOfTheInternet..txt
Where did you get your license bro ?
Women aren't online, duh.
They're really cool allies. You wouldn't understand
We made it the fuck up obviously. Everything on the internet is true anyways
One instance isn't representative of the whole network.
Where does the data come from? I don't think Lemmy stores such kind of data.
I believe similarweb tracks web usage of thousands of validated users (i.e. they know their demographic profile) and they extrapolate on a per site basis form there.
How could that possibly lead to a bias? /s
If you have 10,000+ users that are a representative sample of all internet users (or pretty close), your estimates should be pretty good for popular sites.
Your sample might still be small for lemmy.ml.
I think the demographic for lemmy (and lemmy.ml in particular) is so niche and so biased towards privacy that even with a bigger sample, it's next to impossible to get really good data. Probably good enough to say that it's very likely that there's a significantly skewed gender distribution, though. The user polls that were done on my instance showed similar results IIRC.
Agreed on both counts! :)
Meaning, guesswork?
We call it statistics around these parts. But yeah, it's guesswork.
Statistics is to guesswork what data is to anecdotes.
Lemmy.ml specifically? I doubt if it's representative of Lemmy as a whole.
Lemmy mainly attracts nerds and people into niche technology, which is already predominantly composed of men, so yeah, obviously
Doesn't mean it will be misogynistic. People just don't need to act like assholes and we'll be good
People are downvoting cuz OP said this site is becoming misogynistic plus OP didn’t include the right “sample size.”
But can we be fucking honest? This website is incredibly male dominated. Like why are we arguing this? I woulda figured it was closer to like 95% male users…
And many folks (read: men) on this website don’t like calling out the reality that these heavily male-skewed outlooks can be misogynistic. Like, yeah, you bring tons of men in a room with no women, people will start to say misogynistic shit. It’s not reddit-level bad, but I’ve definitely noticed it.
Say it loud
If you think about it, it kinda makes sense. The fediverse is not a safe place for women especially not the average normie women, due to the fediverse's very public nature of things and general inability to really delete anything.
Reddit can detect and deal with stalkers, you can make your profile more private. Lemmy can't do a whole lot when every instance is firehosing all the data in realtime to everyone's servers. It's a scary amount of data I have in my local Postgres database: everyone's every vote, comments, tied to a profile, with accurate timestamps and all.
If they use an instance without the image proxying, I can also potentially trick them into loading an image from my server and collect IP addresses and correlate to a user via vote timing, and then use GeoIP to get a location.
Lemmy's also very appealing to those that can't stop getting themselves banned from elsewhere as some instances are very friendly to unlimited free speech and gross behaviour. I don't have data to back this claim, but I feel like there's definitely a correlation with those kinds of people and women not feeling safe around them.
In addition to the issues others have pointed out, reddit was like this back in the day too. It's not that weird, even if it is true.
Didn't know that ml still exists LOL
Instance block gang represent!
*Throws weird gang-sign nobody has seen before nor since*
EDIT: Downvoted by one admin from each instance I've blocked
Lemmy has a lack of women problem because Spez probably isn’t shadow banning women as often as men.
Fuck Spez.