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
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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
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.
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.
Too true
How do you track gender category when it is not listed or asked anywhere on the forums?
We made it the fuck up obviously. Everything on the internet is true anyways
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
One instance isn’t representative of the whole network.
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.
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.
Meaning, guesswork?
We call it statistics around these parts. But yeah, it’s guesswork.
Statistics is to guesswork what data is to anecdotes.
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! :)
Lemmy.ml specifically? I doubt if it’s representative of Lemmy as a whole.
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: Downvited by one admins from each instance I’ve blocked
deleted by creator
