I’ve been happily posting away here on two accounts since just before the Great Migration, and have no problem being openly a woman on the internet. Up to and including correcting people who assume I’m a guy, and even occasionally acknowledging the existence of periods.
Which, honestly that was a bad tactic back on Reddit, my inbox was a nightmare. But here it’s gone much better, so thank you to anyone who ever received one of my corrections with good grace!
It’s also brought quite a few DMs my way from other women who try to stay more anonymous with their posts, a choice I can completely understand.
So today on International Women’s Day I just want to wave hello to the other women out there, even if you don’t want to break cover and wave back. Anonymous or not, cis or trans, I see you out there and you’re killing it.
This may break the community rule on encouraging discussion, if nobody wants to out themselves to say hello back. So I guess I should also ask a question.
Um…anyone else using it as an excuse to treat themselves today? I’ve given myself the day (mostly) off work and am doing some fun gamedev all afternoon instead, then we’re planning a takeaway tonight. Easily pleased, perhaps, but sounds good to me 😄
Welcome to the Fediverse!
Indeed, people are quite a bit more welcoming here than Reddit - ofc not everywhere, but more so, on average. If it helps, you can block not only individual users communities, but even whole entire instances - the latter by going into your profile, scrolling way down, and adding the instance name to that list. Do what you want, but for me, when TENS of people continue to spam-reply me WEEKS after I STOP responding, that’s the signal that they are refusing to control themselves, so I take matters into my own hands and block them. For that reason I blocked hexbear and lemmygrad.ml, and some people block lemmy.ml too but I do enjoy their memes and such and just stay out of their politics community so I have not gone that far for that one. If this describes you, note that this can improve your experience in the Fediverse by perhaps 90% so may be WORTH IT. People from those instances can still reply to your posts and comments, but you will not receive notifications anymore, nor see them while you are logged in:-).
One thing more I wanted to make sure that you and your friends know: DMs are not private. I don’t know of any actual tools that makes reading someone’s DMs possible, but the signals are out there and not only admins but anyone could, in theory. Probably that won’t matter 99% of the time but e.g. sending physical addresses or phone numbers would be easy to scan for across the Fediverse by malicious actors.
Anyway, I hope you feel welcomed! (fwiw, I am not a woman, I just wanted to share these thoughts in case they would be helpful:-)
Thanks although, as I said, been here quite a while now. Still it’s good advice for anyone newer who might be reading this, especially the part about the DMs!
My block list is surprisingly short, so far, although let’s see if making such a statement in public ends up changing that fact 😉
Lmao