Weirdly enough old-school chat forums were not all that bad in terms of male to female ration. Back in the late 90s early 2000s I lived in an apartment with two roommates. They spend A LOT of their free time on chat forums and we'd frequently host parties for their friends from the chats. Those where pretty close to 50/50, maybe 60/40.
At that time anonymous online chats seemed to have little issue attracting young women.
> All the fun spaces on the internet are extremely male dominated.
Maybe this is just a reflection of what you consider "fun".
> Discord especially is such a sausage fest.
Discord isn't a single integrated community; there are plenty of servers that aren't sausage fests, maybe you just haven't been interested in, or invited to, them?
> Sad to see it kill web forums (which I suppose were all sausage fests)
> Maybe this is just a reflection of what you consider "fun".
This is what I'd suspect. I'm a lesbian and hang out pretty equally in very male dominated and very female dominated places online. I find it really interesting that most hobby/fandom spaces online do unofficially segregate by gender to the point where it's common in both to just assume everybody there is male/female (and straight, of course, because this all kind of relies on straight gender roles).
> Discord isn't a single integrated community; there are plenty of servers that aren't sausage fests, maybe you just haven't been interested in, or invited to, them?
Yeah, I'm in several female dominated servers and have been in the past. I will say that more of the female dominated servers are private/not advertised, specifically to keep them from being overrun and keeping them a manageable size.
In general, the women care more about curating the social space for ease of connection and are more conscientious when it comes to things like considering how big a server can be before it's a pain to mod, what the impacts of creating another channel would be, what the impacts would be of creating restricted channels would be, etc. Guys wing it more.
It's very much a matter of what topic the forum or Discord server is about to be honest. My experience is that anything particularly tech orientated skews very heavily male, while more arts and crafts esque topics tend to skew more female. So I suspect for many people here (including myself), the communities we're interested in tend to be male dominated simply because tech in general tends to be.
