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.
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.
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.