Keeping it open means people can find it, and it only excludes men from participating. WomensStuff accepts NBs and transwomen and basically anyone who doesn’t identify as a man. Just because it’s not for men doesn’t mean it’s private.
Lemmy has the ability to set who can create Posts within a community, and there are a lot that only allow the mods to create Posts.
Trying to do the same for comments would require a lot more complexity unless comments were tied to subscriptions. Even then it wouldn’t cover the situation of people wanting to subscribe without being eligible to comment.
To be clear, I do think WomensStuff women only rule is 100% perfectly fine for various reasons and the limitations of the software are the issue.
The software could be changed to facilitate what they want to do, it isn’t like the core design couldn’t handle a feature where people could only comment if they were specifically granted permissions for the community. There could even be permissions on who can vote, like restricting to people who are subscribed and whatnot. The fact that it doesn’t exist yet doesn’t mean it can’t work for the intended purpose.
The reason for being in the fediverse is visibility, same as most other communities.
The underlying issue is one of visibility, and making it more visible could also attract unwanted attention. For example, they could address people like myself who can’t keep track of all the community specific rules by changing their name to something like “WomensStuff (no men)” but that would probably prompt people who would otherwise ignore or block the community to go make a fuss like they are in this post.
They could clarify the reason for the rule, although that does make the rules longer. For example they could include something about the intent being to have discussions from women’s perspectives without them being drowned out when limiting who can comment.
future development doesn’t mean anything in this context, but by all means, open a feature request; I’m sure plenty of communities would welcome features like that!
the problem is the disregard for the design of the platform.
it doesn’t do what they want now, and they need to conform to how the platform works now.
public means public. private means private.
those settings exist for a reason.
if visibility is such a concern, make two communities:
one that is public and allows anyone to participate, and one that is private, invite only.
that last one is obviously what they have tried to recreate here, and it’s not how the platform generally works.
in a traditional forum, this isn’t really an issue, since you’d just have a designated board, clearly separate from others. only lemmy is not a traditional forum. it doesn’t have this separation.
anything that shows up on all is supposed to be fair game for everyone.
if you don’t want that, don’t make it show up in all.
i really don’t care if it’s a womens only, or mens only, or canadians only community. the public feed is not the place for that, and with the current state of the software (which is the only thing of relevance here) what this community wants is not possible.
so either:
find a workaround (that doesn’t annoy the general userbase)
contribute to a technical solution (it is a public repo after all)
use software that actually has the feature you want.
annoying users is generally bad Netiquette. this bad Netiquette is the issue at hand.
not the desire for a designated womens space. i haven’t seen anyone in the thread lamenting that.
this whole thing is kind of like setting up a bbq in the middle of a public park, and getting mad at people, when they point out that there is a designated bbq area that you are supposed to use.
it’s not the people pointing out the existence of a designated bbq area that are wrong!
it’s the people ignoring the signs that say “please use the designated area for your bbqs” that are wrong.
The software also doesn’t force people in any community to stay on the topic of that community, that is done through moderation.
this whole thing is kind of like setting up a bbq in the middle of a public park, and getting mad at people, when they point out that there is a designated bbq area that you are supposed to use
Actually it is more like having a BBQ competition in the park where only people who registered can participate in the BBQ competition but everyone else is free to watch, but not group up and shout over the people participating in the competition.
Setting it to private would limit its discoverability for people who are welcome to contribute, which as you say, is about half of all people. Some people like to lurk and read without posting which is perfectly fine and even welcomed. It’s not a private forum, it’s a forum that just asks men not to post.
In terms of how forums work, it is saying it wants to be private but also public. There is no default setting for that, but there are ways to do it that achieve what you want without breaking the public/private system. For instance you can make the forum public, but set it to only allow comments from approved users.
Keeping it open means people can find it, and it only excludes men from participating. WomensStuff accepts NBs and transwomen and basically anyone who doesn’t identify as a man. Just because it’s not for men doesn’t mean it’s private.
In terms of how platforms work, a forum is either set to ‘public’ for everyone, or set to ‘private’ if you want to control who interacts with a forum
Lemmy has the ability to set who can create Posts within a community, and there are a lot that only allow the mods to create Posts.
Trying to do the same for comments would require a lot more complexity unless comments were tied to subscriptions. Even then it wouldn’t cover the situation of people wanting to subscribe without being eligible to comment.
To be clear, I do think WomensStuff women only rule is 100% perfectly fine for various reasons and the limitations of the software are the issue.
i agree with this, but would like to point out:
if the software can’t do what you want it to do…you need to use a different software.
from what i can tell about the community, they really want to be a discord server, but on lemmy…why not just use discord in the first place then?
faulting the general userbase for using the software exactly as intended and then getting mad about it seems…really toxic…and intentionally combative.
The software could be changed to facilitate what they want to do, it isn’t like the core design couldn’t handle a feature where people could only comment if they were specifically granted permissions for the community. There could even be permissions on who can vote, like restricting to people who are subscribed and whatnot. The fact that it doesn’t exist yet doesn’t mean it can’t work for the intended purpose.
The reason for being in the fediverse is visibility, same as most other communities.
The underlying issue is one of visibility, and making it more visible could also attract unwanted attention. For example, they could address people like myself who can’t keep track of all the community specific rules by changing their name to something like “WomensStuff (no men)” but that would probably prompt people who would otherwise ignore or block the community to go make a fuss like they are in this post.
They could clarify the reason for the rule, although that does make the rules longer. For example they could include something about the intent being to have discussions from women’s perspectives without them being drowned out when limiting who can comment.
the point I’m making is:
the software doesn’t do what they want right now.
future development doesn’t mean anything in this context, but by all means, open a feature request; I’m sure plenty of communities would welcome features like that!
the problem is the disregard for the design of the platform.
it doesn’t do what they want now, and they need to conform to how the platform works now.
public means public. private means private.
those settings exist for a reason.
if visibility is such a concern, make two communities:
one that is public and allows anyone to participate, and one that is private, invite only.
that last one is obviously what they have tried to recreate here, and it’s not how the platform generally works.
in a traditional forum, this isn’t really an issue, since you’d just have a designated board, clearly separate from others. only lemmy is not a traditional forum. it doesn’t have this separation.
anything that shows up on all is supposed to be fair game for everyone.
if you don’t want that, don’t make it show up in all.
i really don’t care if it’s a womens only, or mens only, or canadians only community. the public feed is not the place for that, and with the current state of the software (which is the only thing of relevance here) what this community wants is not possible.
so either:
annoying users is generally bad Netiquette. this bad Netiquette is the issue at hand.
not the desire for a designated womens space. i haven’t seen anyone in the thread lamenting that.
this whole thing is kind of like setting up a bbq in the middle of a public park, and getting mad at people, when they point out that there is a designated bbq area that you are supposed to use.
it’s not the people pointing out the existence of a designated bbq area that are wrong!
it’s the people ignoring the signs that say “please use the designated area for your bbqs” that are wrong.
The software also doesn’t force people in any community to stay on the topic of that community, that is done through moderation.
Actually it is more like having a BBQ competition in the park where only people who registered can participate in the BBQ competition but everyone else is free to watch, but not group up and shout over the people participating in the competition.
no, that is very much different.
pie recipes on FuckCars get deleted because of their content, not because of who posted them.
rules are supposed to be for content.
this constitutes a misuse of the rule system.
I revised my example to fit the park setting, but not fast enough. Can you see if that makes more sense?
The software limitation signage is that the signage is hard to see.
if that’s the case nearly 100% of Lemmy is ‘private’ because people who break the rules get banned
Setting it to private would limit its discoverability for people who are welcome to contribute, which as you say, is about half of all people. Some people like to lurk and read without posting which is perfectly fine and even welcomed. It’s not a private forum, it’s a forum that just asks men not to post.
In terms of how forums work, it is saying it wants to be private but also public. There is no default setting for that, but there are ways to do it that achieve what you want without breaking the public/private system. For instance you can make the forum public, but set it to only allow comments from approved users.