So I just discovered c/womensstuff, commented in a thread that took my interest and got a somewhat abusive “eff off” comment from a mod with added sarcasm.
I then saw it’s “women only”. This is the only community I know that bans based on a protected identity of a person, e.g. in the UK, it’s illegal to discriminate based on gender, sexuality, religion etc.
How does everyone feel about this for Lemmy communities?
Conceptually it’s fine, but I 100% expect, in the fullness of time, I’ll accidentally post in one not thinking about it since I pretty much exclusively operate from the firehose feed. Until there’s a little more tooling around it (like, if I could mark a community as ‘read-only for me’) , I think strict/aggressive moderation to enforce that rule is kinda problematic.
It’s like eves dropping on a group of people in public. Yes, they’re talking where anyone can listen, but it tends to make people uncomfortable if you lurk there obviously or chime into their conversation, so it’s polite to move on or ignore them. I just blocked them, out of respect, not frustration. It just removes the temptation while not affecting them in any way.
The best part is, as another person said in this post, is any questions you do have that are female related, you can ask in another community and those same nice ladies will answer you. 😁
That’s exactly what I did, blocking them out of respect rather than frustration. I browse /r/all and, more than a couple times, found myself about to leave a comment in support or agreement with something there, only to remember what community it was. I liked seeing their posts, but was worried I’d eventually accidentally butt in without realizing, so I blocked the community from my feed.
Like other users here mentioned, though, I’ve seen that the mods are generally polite and professional, and have even left some of those supportive “as a man” posts up (while reiterating the request not to post again), so they’re not going out of their way to straight-up ban people unless there is either immediate disrespect or disregarding the rule after the warning.
The conversation there looked great, so I kept finding myself there, so I just sucked it up. I always saw them politely ask people to respect the rule, but I know it’s gotta get old repeating themselves every time. Guys got literally every other community! Let them have one in peace. They know where to find us fellas if they really need us. 🤣
Why? If you look at the interaction OP had, he made a post in the women-only community proclaiming himself to be a man, was asked politely by a mod not to post again, posted again, and was banned. Seems this is an easy situation to avoid by simply… not posting again if asked not to.
Even if you do get banned for posting when you don’t belong, how is that any different than if you’d proactively marked the community as read-only?