Not me, but if you’ve been following the drama, they removed this post about the unique issues we face as “divisive.”
It fucking sucks. There’s been a lot of discussion in other trans masc spaces about “transandrophobia” and this seems to absolutely demonstrate it. We aren’t treated seriously in spaces that should be welcoming for us.
People assume “trans” means trans woman. Spaces for trans people are often for trans women. Jamison Green wrote a while back about us not really having our own community, decades ago, and it still feels true today.
Reddit and discord are fundamentally unsafe places for trans people, any queer communities there are intentionally or unintentionally helping prevent people from moving to more safe platforms.
to answer to anyone asking why discord, any community that doesn’t have a focus on queer topics, statistically is not great for trans folk. Many big communities are, yes, but you also have to remember discord has a LOT of servers.
I heard of people attacking the suggestion of switching to Matrix claiming they “want to remain accessible”. When the clients Cinny and Fluffy Chat blow Discord out of the water.
To be fair Matrix does lack a lot of features still. Video and voice calls are a mess, there’s not the equivelent of voice channels afawk.
For those of us who are plural, there’s no plural kit alternative (at least not widely avaliable), the moderation tools and permissions systems are a joke (we should know we used to moderate a whole server and several spaces). The search is really bad or non existent in several clients.
A lot of this is because those behind matrix are more concerned with corporations and their needs than the common user, and keep making really ridiculous and assinine decisions; like keeping matrix.org as open signups until it becomes too big to moderate and they have to start charging people for the privelege of decent performance, instead of what they should have done a long time ago and shutting their doors so as to encourage federation.
Matrix is actually not at all well thought through or accessible, we have never and will never use discord, but we can’t deny they have a point.
there is the possibility to use mumble for voice chat and jitsi meet for video, while using matrix for text and basic calls.
But yeah I agree with you overall its really unintuitive.
I know tons of trans people on discord. What makes it unsafe for them?
I think there’s a disconnect between people who use discord as an IM client and people who use discord as a way to find communities. Ive been using discord since like the friends and family alpha, and I’ve never once joined a server that was larger than “4-12 people I know irl who hate group texts.” The way I understand and think about discord is drastically different from somebody who uses it more like a decentralized forum full of hobby or creator driven communities. I’d guess that the latter half is what is being referred to as dangerous for trans folk, but again I cannot confirm as discord is functionally equivalent to like MSN messenger for me
I’m part of some pretty large discord communities and I wouldn’t describe any of them as hostile to trans people. However, I am not trans, so I was curious if there was some insight I was missing out on.
Discord has been really useful to find and talk to other trans people
I wouldn’t personally call the whole platform unsafe. A lot of big servers, yeah not gonna be too great.
why Discord? isn’t it moderated mostly by the people who start the communities like Lemmy? (genuinely asking because I don’t know)
The problem is Discord servers have become too large and too public, that leads to a lot of trolls and bad actors.
Not all discords servers are large and not all of them allow bad actors to exist