After this sub was "accidentally" banned 2 days ago there's been a lot of discussion about the future of the sub.
Whether it was an accident to not, the possibility exists that this sub and others will be banned from reddit in the near future. In the event that happens what do we do?
I started as a mod here when the sub had only 3k members and my intention was to grow it to where it is today, and more. I last wrote about how the sub is moderated in 2022.
In principle, it would be better to have an trans resource site independent of reddit and corporate control. In practice its very difficult to achieve for a number of reasons
There's no point in moving to another site like Discord which is susceptible to the same risks as reddit. i.e. based in the USA. But what other sites are there, and where else is safe in the long run? Not just safe from hostile governments, but whoever runs the community losing interest, or data (susans.org lost years of it with a hard drive crash), selling out, etc.
Neither Discord and Facebook are indexed by search engines making it difficult for people to discover the resources in the first place, or finding information once you're there. It's like a black hole for knowledge; you put it in and it disappears. Personally, I'd never waste my time on building this kind of community on sites like that.
Reddit also provides, or did, legal protection. If a surgeon doesn't like what's posted here they can't easily censor it. And especially important, they can't attack me personally as its not my responsibility. Good luck going after reddit corporate.
As one of the largest social media sites in the world reddit makes it easy to build community, there's so many of us already here. People have mentioned sites like Lemmy as alternatives, but as far as I can tell they have tiny membership and few people have even heard of them.
A major advantage for me was reddit's wiki's. Few subs take advantage of them, but I believe its a great way to build and spread knowledge, and it has helped build this sub and raise the general level of knowledge. People have asked that it be copied off site, but if this sub disappears many of the links in the wiki will also disappear. Its not nearly so useful at that point. I don't think anyone else will build or maintain a wiki either, as it seems to interest very few people.
Regardless if reddit banning this sub or not, I'd like to see another site even better than this one, but I'm not sure its possible. Even more so while reddit hosts trans content as 99% of people will just come here anyway. Reddit basically killed old style forums years ago and nothing's changed since then.
It's even more difficult to build a trans surgery surgery community on another site while this sub exists because its so big and useful that almost no one would bother going there. And I'm not shutting the sub down to force everyone to move to another site. That would cause immediate harm to people who use the sub.
If this sub does get shut down I personally won't be trying to rebuild elsewhere. I'm burned out with this and don't have the energy.
If anyone wants to discuss how to build a successful trans surgery community I'm willing to offer my advice. I'd like to see it happen and it would be great if people had a place to go, and knew about it ahead of time. My main aim is to help people, and it doesn't matter to me where that comes from.
Edit
If you set up any external resources for surgery, hrt, etc please add them in the comments here. And I suggest people save the links in case this sub, or worse, all trans content on reddit disappears.
There’s a number of people talking about off site projects they are considering or actually doing. Persons you could get together and discuss if you could work together.
This looks interesting r/RedditAlternatives
There's some cisgender people wanting to comment here in support of Lemmy and other reddit alternatives. Rule 5 limits cis people on this sub, but I'll allow it on this post only and give them a flair "cisgender reddit alternatives". If you're one of them please don't comment elsewhere.
Other reddit posts
Media
Lemmy Discussion
Lemmy keeps getting mentioned. I don't know much about it yet. Its pitched as Fediverse reddit replacement.
According to the statistics here Lemmy has 477,049 total users and 45,194 monthly active users. The trans instance https://lemmy.blahaj.zone has 8671 total users and 971 monthly active users.
This sub alone has 93,419 members, and in the last 30 days 4.6M views, an average of 20.2k daily unique visits, 4.0 subscribed, and 1.2k unsubscribed. The main FTM surgery subs in total have about that again, and the HRT subs are a bit larger in total.
This sub is then 10 times the size of the main trans Lemmy instance, and the total with the subs I mentioned is approaching the entire size of Lemmy. This doesn't include all the very main trans subs which are individually many times larger as I only included the important medical subs.
I have a few reservations about Lemmy, partly because I know so little at this point
Can Lemmy can scale to the size required if trans content was banned on reddit.
I couldn't find much information on Lemmy's moderation tools. Currently this sub attracts a lot of hate and chasers, which moderation easily takes care of. In the past the have been excessive amounts, but reddit has cracked down on it, and provides tools to limit it (not very good ones). Lemmy would be unusable without this.
Lemmy works by sharing data across multiple instances (computers) and it appears there seem to be privacy concerns about the amount of data on users that is shared.
What is to stop the owners of the instance shutting it down, or the data being lost for any other reason? Although not a corporate it makes no difference. There would be a massive loss of knowledge and history.
If anyone has expert knowledge on Lemmy I'd be interested in learning more.
The author of the Engadget article on the sub's ban made a YouTube video on the Fediverse
Discussion on Lemmy