Governing Without Exposure: Feminist Infrastructures for Queer Digital Publics in Taiwan

Digital feminist publics rarely control the infrastructures they inhabit. Queer and sex-positive communities, in particular, are often governed through opaque moderation on commercial platforms, intensified by legal regimes that treat sexual content as inherently risky. This Paper examines a rare counterexample: Lezismore, a self-hosted Taiwanese queer platform that has sustained 35-50k monthly users for nearly a decade without identity verification, while remaining friendly to intimacy-adjacent content and largely independent from Big Tech infrastructures. The empirical puzzle arises from a now-familiar safety practice: public call-outs that post screenshots of private messages as warnings. On Lezismore, as in many feminist and LGBTQI spaces, “screenshot truths” were initially embraced as tools to expose harassment and abuse. Yet they rapidly produced secondary harms: emotional pile-ons, retaliatory disclosure, and durable search traces that hardened provisional allegations into long-term identity markers. Building on long-horizon stewardship of the platform, I develop a harm model along three axes – immediacy, irreversibility, and misattribution – to show how exposure-based safety disproportionately disciplines those whose lives already unfold at the margins. The Paper then reframes feminist safety not as a choice between “believe survivors” and “protect due process”, but as an infrastructural design problem. Drawing on Taiwanese and US legal doctrines on copyright, privacy, and data protection, I treat law as a set of product constraints rather than ex post remedies.  This yields four deployable patterns that replace exposure with auditable, non-exposure safety mechanisms: Mediated Whisper (moderator-curated, rate-limited behavioural signals), Consent-Aware Receipts (user-held boundary proofs), Bundled Context Windows (minimum context packages that deter one-screenshot truths), and Ephemeral Safety Bulletins (expiring, non-indexable warnings with visible appeal hooks). I situate these patterns as feminist democratic infrastructures: supports and arrangements that redistribute who can speak, who can be warned, and who can recover, without demanding visibility, confession, or real-name verification as the price of safety. Empirically, I draw on anonymised, practice-based vignettes and inspectable process artefacts (intake forms, rate-limit settings, appeal logs) rather than raw private content, aligning evaluation with “harm avoided” metrics such as first-time reporter share and time-to-retraction. By grounding democratic innovation in the everyday governance of a queer digital public in East Asia, the Paper speaks to the Workshop’s concern with infrastructures for feminist publics under authoritarian and patriarchal backlash. It suggests that resisting macho call-out cultures and carceral impulses requires not only new norms, but also carefully paced, non-exposure infrastructures that make feminist publics both safer and more durable.