Community Curation

Published Wednesday 25 June 2025

Hi friends! For those who do not know me, I am Naomi and my pronouns are she/her. I am a Developer Experience Engineer at Deepgram, with a heavy focus on community tooling and infrastructure, and the Community Manager at freeCodeCamp. I have a strong background in community building and community management. I wanted to take some time today to write about how you can cultivate an inclusive and welcoming community for all of your users.

Why is creating inclusive online spaces so important?

People of marginalised identities continue to face discrimination in professional environments, both in cyberspace and in meatspace. These barriers increase the friction they encounter when trying to succeed in our industry. By creating safe spaces for folks regardless of their identity, we can help tear down some of those barriers and foster a healthier culture.

Online platforms such as Discord or Reddit also offer a certain level of pseudo-anonymity. This means that a medium like a Discord server can provide a space where folks can safely explore their identity. In fact, it was because of the encouraging community at TweetShift that I was able to find my own identity and determine my path toward happiness in life.

The impact that the LGBT community has on our industry is often understated. Consider that while roughly 3% of our industry's workforce actively identify as LGBT, 46% of the folks who would identify do not feel safe to do so. Which means that 3% could be as high as 6%! By cultivating inclusive and public tech spaces, we open doors for the future generation of developers - the LGBT folks who are looking for mentors or role models "like themselves" can find those people and engage with them in a safe community.

But how can I create an inclusive community?

Well, there are a few things you can do.

Our first example is more Discord specific: you can provide pronoun roles for members to select to self-identify how they wish to be addressed. There are a couple of key components to this. First, in every community I run I make these roles mandatory. By doing so, I start to tear down the assumption that only LGBT people would select pronouns. When you normalise this as the standard for everyone, folks are no longer "outing themselves" just for selecting a role. Second, it is important to provide a decent array of options. Too often, I see roles limited to "she/her", "he/him", and "they/them". As the LGBT community grows, we continue to see folks using pronouns like "it/its", or using neopronouns like "fae/faer" or "ze/zyr". Offering roles to cover your community's less common pronouns creates a more welcoming space, and for folks who use neopronouns that you do not have a role for, offering an "ask my pronouns" or "i use neopronouns" role can help.

Your next task is to create community policies, such as a Code of Conduct, that specifically enforce an inclusive environment. For example, my community's Code of Conduct includes verbiage about not challenging or questioning someone's identity (such as "those aren't real pronouns"), and disallowing debates of the rights of marginalised communities (such as "trans people don't need to use the restroom they identify with"). If you are interested, I would be happy to help you construct your own Code of Conduct.

But these policies are meaningless if they are not enforced. And when you enforce them, you must be aware of how your enforcement decision might appear to the community. For example, if someone uses a slur, then tries to justify it as "I was just joking", it may seem tempting to let them off with a warning. But I would immediately ban the user from the community in such a case, because doing so sets the precedent for the other members that toxic behaviour will not be tolerated even as a "joke".

You also need to be cognisant of your own language choices. As a community leader, you need to set the example for the rest of your members. Being aware of things like folks' pronouns, avoiding language like "cr*zy" that might seem okay but has a history of being used to harm people, and carrying yourself in a way that demonstrates how you want your members to interact are all important considerations. You may even want to consider avoiding phrases like "Hey guys", which implicitly assumes that "male" is the default gender.

Finally, the space must be made for folks who are uninformed, rather than bigoted. Someone who comes in and comments that trans people should not have bathroom access is bigoted. Someone who comes in and asks why the bathroom legislation seems like "such a big deal" might just be uninformed. Creating a space where folks can ask their questions and become educated will empower people to become positive allies, or even discover their own identity.

How does this help my business or organisation?

One of the biggest benefits of curating these communities is that you can avoid negative optics. For example, let us consider Hyprland. For those who are not familiar, Hyprland is a window manager for Linux that gained quite a bit of popularity for the feature set it offers.

However, the community around this app has a very rough history of bigotry and harassment of marginalised peoples.

The negative optics got so bad, in fact, that the Arch Linux Discord community had to explicitly ban discussions around the controversy - because every time Hyprland was mentioned, it turned into "YOU USE THAT? DO YOU HATE LGBT PEOPLE??". Which is definitely not a phrase you want people to use when describing your organisation.

On the flip side, then, you can also gain some positive word of mouth advertising. Members of marginalised identities who feel safe in your community are much more likely to become evangelists. A queer person who has a better experience with your community than a competitor's community, as an example, will tend to recommend your products first - because they felt safe in your space. They may even do so if your product feels inferior than the competitor's to them!

This can also trickle up into new talent for your teams. When marginalised folk feel safe in your public communities, the impression can be created that your internal spaces and teams are also safe. This means that LGBT people might be more likely to apply to work for you when you have a healthier community.

All of these, then, create opportunity for sweet sweet revenue. Whether you are driving sales and conversions by providing comfortable opportunities for users to explore your product, or capturing new talent that other companies might miss out on, you can leverage your community health to create growth for your organisation.

But who can help with this?

First, your community leaders are the most important champions here. When your leaders conduct themselves in a way that embodies the inclusive environment you want for your community, then you set the standard for engagement which your community members will follow.

Your community members, then, can also help with this! By following the guidelines you have established and ensuring their behaviour is in line with those guidelines, they can contribute to the well-being of the community. But it does not stop there! When a community is truly successful at inclusion, members will help inform each other about opportunities to improve and grow.

So really, the answer is everyone can help with this! Even people who are not actively part of your community can still be valuable sources of information and opportunities for growth.

Which brings me to my final point:

Always keep an open mind!

None of us will have all of the answers. It is simply impossible. Even as someone who lives these experiences daily, I do not have all of the answers. It is important that we allow ourselves the space to be wrong, the opportunity to improve, and the ability to handle our missteps with grace.

I look forward to seeing the positive impact you will have on your communities. If you have any questions or would like to schedule some time to explore this further, please feel free to reach out in our Discord. Thank you for your time, and happy pride!