Balancing Openness and Safety: Central and Peripheral Governance Practices in the Lesbian Subreddit Ecosystem

2026-03-17

AI Summary

This study examines the governance tensions faced by online lesbian communities navigating visibility and safety, particularly within Reddit’s interconnected ecosystem. Integrating link network analysis across 29 subreddits with thematic qualitative analysis of 167 community rule sets, the work proposes a differentiated governance model grounded in an ecosystem perspective. Findings reveal a functional division of governance labor: 34% of central communities prioritize content quality to attract broad audiences, while 66% of peripheral communities emphasize boundary control to safeguard specific identity groups. This challenges monolithic content moderation paradigms and underscores the need for governance tools that are calibrated to community roles and contextual needs, offering new design principles for diverse online communities.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Graph Mining, Social Network Analysis & Community
• Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Fair Division

Application Category

• Social Networks and Social Media: Media and governance, opinion dynamics, filter bubbles, polarization
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Incentives in network design for Web infrastructures and ecosystems
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Community question answering

Abstract

Online LGBTQ+ communities face a persistent tension: remaining visible to welcome newcomers while protecting members from harassment. This challenge is particularly acute for lesbian communities on Reddit, which operate not as isolated groups but as an interconnected ecosystem. We examine how this tension is negotiated across the lesbian subreddit ecosystem (N=29) by combining network analysis of cross-subreddit links with a qualitative thematic analysis of 167 subreddit rules. Our findings show a functional division of governance labor between central (34%) and peripheral subreddits (66%). While all communities share a baseline of safety regulations, central subreddits prioritize content curation and feed quality to support a large, public-facing audience, whereas peripheral subreddits emphasize boundary maintenance and participation control to protect smaller, identity-specific niches. These findings challenge monolithic moderation approaches and highlight the need for ecosystem-aware design. We argue that effective moderation requires role- and context-sensitive tools supporting visibility and safety across interconnected spaces.

Problem

• online LGBTQ+ communities
• visibility
• harassment protection
• subreddit ecosystem
• moderation tension

Innovation

• ecosystem-aware moderation
• central-peripheral governance
• LGBTQ+ online communities
• context-sensitive design
• boundary maintenance