I’m not sure how to respond to all three of you kind of asking the same question about feeling “unsafe”, so I guess I’ll just try to tag the other two. @AbruptLucidity@lemmy.world @zacher_glachl@lemmy.world
I myself would not put me in a category of people that would have the feeling of being unsafe. I am a white guy in a western country, doesn’t really get any easier than that. Also keep in mind that this is kind of a guess from my side so you should not take this as fact or anything.
My thought when people generally use “safe space” is not that they mean that they are scared when browsing the web. I think they mean it more in a way that every day they might get to hear comments about their looks or preferences when it really is uncalled for, so having a safe space is more about just getting to have an interaction with other people and not having to worry about those kind of comments. So your comment about infantry school and Ramadi is a different kind of “unsafe” thing. Maybe I would categorize that as a dangerous job. I guess that you are from the United States so Ramadi would even be something that you don’t have a connection to, you go there and then come back home where you don’t have the same threat levels when just going outside. For other people that unsafe feeling could come from just going outside even in their home community/city/country.
The way I try to think about it just to take something about your look, like let’s say your hair. You like it a certain way and it does not really affect how you are as a person or your skill set when it comes to work or life in general. Then just imagine that you go to get groceries and people start commenting your hair, in a bad way. Maybe even going as far as saying something about your worth when they in fact do not know anything about you. They just made the assumption based on your hairstyle. Then this continues as time goes on, some might even get a bit too in your face about it and you don’t really know what they’re capable of! Then these are also your countrymen! People you went to the same school with, people from the same state, people that in general might like the same things as you. They cheer for the same sports team, they like the same kind of pizza as you. But just because of that hairstyle you have they start thinking less of you!
Those are just my two cents! I know I have it pretty easy so I try to see things from other peoples perspective or however you say that, because I know other people have far more challenges than me in everyday life.
Yeah I absolutely agree with you on the forum part. It feels like they didn’t quite think things through when choosing a really open platform like Lemmy. Like you said, what probably suits their use case is just a good old fashioned forum that is not linked to anything else in any way.
I also want to see Lemmy grow and I am curious to see where we end up with this whole federation thing. The whole idea sounds really nice and if we get sites working together this could in the end make it super easy for people to find cool communities. Or maybe sites don’t even need to actively work together since just being federated should take care of it!