Transgender women and transfeminine nonbinary people (transfems) rely on social media for community and critical resources that are rare offline. However, transfems face perpetual risks of those communities suddenly turning hostile or transphobic, forcing withdrawal and losing those resources. To investigate, we conducted a two-stage asynchronous remote communities (ARC) study with 27 total participants, drawn from transfeminine-heavy online communities. We found that transfems forced off crucial platforms by transphobic hostility experience digital solastalgia, distress caused by observing a platform’s character significantly erode over time. Moreover, through visual elicitation, we found that transfems perceive characteristics of locality and space in their online communities. These factors shape transfems’ disengagement strategies and community structures. Informed by this, we develop community-sourced design guidance for designers and admins on building robust online platforms that can better protect transfeminine communities, and investigate the transferable effects of these suggestions to other marginalized groups, such as disabled users.

Online platforms have become a key avenue for forming new relationships, especially for queer individuals. However, some individuals, such as those in asexual and aromantic communities (A-Spec), seek forms of relationships that trouble existing frameworks assumed by online platforms, such as dating apps. To investigate A-Spec needs, we conducted an 8-week ARC study with 38 A-Spec participants who have used online platforms for developing relationships. Participants described a mismatch between the design of dating apps and their approach to building relationships, suggesting platform design that combines affordances of dating apps and other social platforms. We thus outline a “process-oriented” paradigm for relationship-building platforms inspired by community design suggestions, supporting participants’ process of first establishing a low-stakes relationship and then co-constructing its properties. We also argue for a “pluralized” approach to defining identity and relationship in the design of online systems, upsetting default assumptions surrounding any given label.

The Discord platform allows marginalized people access to critical communities and resources unavailable elsewhere. Discord server staff often protect these communities through membership curation , which encompasses acts intended to deny or gate server access to certain users. Using a constructivist grounded theory approach, we interviewed fourteen Discord staff members to better understand the tensions between membership curation and open access to communities and resources. We found that excessive curation promotes a pattern of insular, atomized guarded cliques , which jeopardizes access to critical Discord spaces for marginalized users who clash with cultural or group norms, sometimes translating into severe offline harms. We determined that membership curation often functions as resistance against cultural change, and it is also used to minimize the need for active moderation. Based on these findings, we offer a series of transferable design recommendations and best practices for both the Discord platform and for server staff.

The Fediverse (the network encompassing Mastodon, Pleroma, Lemmy, etc.) provides a decentralized alternative to traditional social media platforms, making it both an important refuge for marginalized users and a platform which is well-suited for conducting mutual aid. One emergent type of moderation action for maintaining mutual aid spaces on the Fediverse is the use of community boundary blocklists, which we define as shared lists of Fediverse servers intended to be imported as a common blocklist. However, the use of community boundary blocklists has incited conflict on the Fediverse, with many users left cut off from their communities and sources of support due to actions outside of their control. Using an approach rooted in constructivist grounded theory, we interviewed nine Fediverse users, including a mix of community boundary blocklist curators, server staff, and regular users, to determine key tensions between community moderation and mutual aid practices. From our interviews, we identify the novel perspective of community stewardship as an act of mutual aid. We extend existing collective action and mutual aid frameworks to understand why this perspective conflicts with more typical mutual aid activities. We also observe how federation as a protocol encodes a negative form of consent, allowing users to interact by default and individuals to consent for their entire instance, leading to consent violations. From these insights, we develop a series of community-sourced suggestions for Fediverse platform designers, blocklist curators, and community staff to help address these conflicts and protect marginalized users.

Relationship platforms (e.g., dating apps) are crucial tools for sapphics (trans women, cisgender women, and nonbinary people who are attracted to other sapphics). However, current platforms are not designed in a way that accounts for sapphic lived experience, especially the lived experience of sapphics who hold multiple marginalized identity characteristics. Even on platforms that do exist for sapphics, transgender women and nonbinary people are often subject to discrimination, fetishization, and stigmatization. To aid in the design of platforms that better serve the needs of multiply marginalized sapphics, we engaged a diverse group of 25 sapphics in six rounds of community discussion on key topics for relationship platform design. Based on participant discussions, we identify key challenges when designing for multiply marginalized sapphics around relationship structures, gender and sexuality classification, and safety priorities for interaction. We present two design priorities alongside community-sourced design directions which can help future designers address these challenges: identity-centric safety and community-based information formats.