An all-inclusive community for questions, news, and discussion about gender and sexuality with an LGBTQIA focus.
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An all-inclusive community for questions, news, and discussion about gender and sexuality with an LGBTQIA focus.

An all-inclusive community for questions, news, and discussion about gender and sexuality with an LGBTQIA focus.
Politics and the news are pretty tough right now, so I thought it would be good to have a more positive question :)
My girlfriend has done more coding work on her/our very-gender-inclusive social network and dating site thing, and it's been pretty busy there too, so I've had plenty of work to do there and I like it a lot!
Does the coding effect the inclusiveness of the site, or is the community going to start out with a no tolerance of hatred guideline?
Well, kind of a combination, I guess? It has an amazing pronoun system, so you can teach the site about your pronoun sets and choose pronoun sets that other people have created. It doesn't put he and she pronouns at the top of the list for the convenience of binary people - it sorts by most commonly used.
And instead of saying "I'm a [binary] looking for a [binary]", it matches people based on tags - so you might tag yourself #man and #male, but also maybe #knitter and #minecrafter and suchlike. :D And you can use tags for "looking for": #woman, #nonbinary, #knitter, #non-smoker, etc. Which means that nonbinary people aren't shunted into an "other" box, and everyone enters their gender in the same way - and all genders are treated equally. (And then, if you're into the online dating bit, it gives you a match score with other members based on what you're both looking for in other people.)
We also have a no tolerance of hatred guideline, but it's not actually written down anywhere on the site yet because we're still young as a site! (It's been in development for about a year, and we're very very close to beta.) We have talked about it a lot though, and we agree that invalidating other people's pronouns, genders, mental illnesses, membership of particular subcultures and communities etc. is not acceptable and would be a bannable offence. I think probably writing down some rules and guidelines is going to be on the cards pretty soon, because there's been an influx of new members and so there's a bit more site activity at the moment!
That sounds really interesting actually. Is the site non-monogamy friendly? I suppose since it uses tags it would be because you could just take yourself as poly or whatever else you identify with.
Most definitely! Me and my girlfriend are both non-monogamous, and I just counted - #polyamorous is the 13th most used tag on the site in the "I am" box. :D
Awesome! I just signed up. Trying to figure out what the heck to put in the "you are/do/have" box, lol.
That's actually a really tough one! If you have no gender preference I'd recommend starting with the Any or No Gender tag. But yeah, I'm like, "I don't know, people are nice! I'm cool with whatever." Oh another thing is, you can check out the All Tags page and see what other people are putting in the "you" box. Here's mine:
(The !pro life tag is a tag with the NOT operator - so that means I won't see people who have a "pro life" tag in their I am/have/do box.)
But if it is at all reassuring, the "you" field is the one that gets the fewest tags. We have a dorky stats page because... reasons, and we were curious about how people were using the tags. These two are relevant:
People put fewer tags in the "you" box, and also are less likely to make those tags public. Innnnnteresting. :)
That's good to know! I'm gonna go brows the all tags list.
Oh that sounds like a neat concept! Will we hear about it here when it's done?
If I'm still active on Imzy, yes - I'm happy to check in and share the URL when we eventually leave beta!
It's starfriends.org. We're in open alpha at the moment, very close to open beta. If you don't want to join until the site is better that is very reasonable - you could follow on Twitter and/or Tumblr instead. And I think before we get to beta I should probably set up some kind of mailing list thing for people who want to be notified when the site leaves beta.
I had a really good surprise friend date yesterday and got some fresh air at the beach. Really needed it. Got fired 2 weeks ago on a brand-new job, so things are tough right now.
Sorry to hear about getting fired, that sucks. Fresh air at the beach sounds nice though :)
I published my first chrome extension this week! Most of my side projects never see the light of day so I'm really happy about it :)
I got good feedback on a tiny makeup-assignment for a missed class. I also temped at an elementary school today (so yay money) and applied for the first summer job of the year.
Awesome!
My laptop broke down and I thought it was gone for good, but it works again! Apparently it was just missing lots of updates.
Glad it's working again!
After two years procrastinating, finally got my legal name change. :-)
Oh congrats! That's super awesome.
I learned how to screen print and made some cool t shirts
AHHHH that's so awesome.
I got a match on a dating app, who not only did I not have to explain what asexuality is (and explain how not all asexuals are aromantic, or vis versa), but for whom asexuality isn't a deal breaker. They live too far away, since I don't drive and they aren't on any public transit routes, but it gave me hope for the future.
Yay hope! That's cool :)