this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2025
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-56
Lemmy has a problem (infosec.pub)
submitted 1 week ago by blargh513@sh.itjust.works to c/technology@lemmy.world
34 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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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[–] Alphane_Moon@lemmy.world 9 points 1 week ago (2 children)

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.

[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Meaning, guesswork?

[–] rikudou@lemmings.world 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

We call it statistics around these parts. But yeah, it's guesswork.

[–] GreyEyedGhost@lemmy.ca 4 points 6 days ago

Statistics is to guesswork what data is to anecdotes.

[–] rumschlumpel@feddit.org 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

How could that possibly lead to a bias? /s

[–] Alphane_Moon@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

[–] rumschlumpel@feddit.org 10 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] Alphane_Moon@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago

Agreed on both counts! :)