4 things white people can do to start making the fediverse less toxic for Black people (DRAFT!)
4 things white people can do to start making the fediverse less toxic for Black people (DRAFT!)
Draft! Work in progress! Feedback welcome!
Feedback welcome! Here's the TL;DR list
- Listen more to more Black people
- Post less – and think before you post
- Call in, call out, and/or report anti-Blackness when you see it
- Support Black people and Black-led instances and projects
Other suggestions?
Post less – and think before you post
Does the fediverse have a problem with too much posting? 🤔
Too much posting by racist assholes, for sure.
Have you seen a lot of racism towards black people on the fediverse? Why are you spamming this everywhere? It doesnt make much sense telling people not to post on a platform that needs it more than anything.
Have you seen a lot of racism towards black people on the fediverse?
Yes.
It doesnt make much sense telling people not to post on a platform that needs it more than anything.
It doesn't make much sense commenting here without reading the actual post so that you know what the synopsis means by "post less".
Jesus H. Fuck, you're boring.
yes, there’s a fuckton of racism on the fediverse. are you new?
You want to share? Or just leave me to keep doom scrolling and not seeing anything outside of Trump articles? I am exclusively on Lemmy.
From the very beinning of the article, in the quote from tillshadeisgone:
"In recent days, folks such as @[email protected], @[email protected], @[email protected] ... and many, MANY more have been speaking out about how toxic fedi culture is for Black folks and how the tools we have access to just aren't enough."
There are also several links to articles with a lot more detail on the fediverse's history of anti-Blackness.
This must be a mastadon thing or something. I'm on Lemmy. All I see is Linux, left leaning politics, and memes. Awareness is great, but I'm just saying I can't even tell who is what race on here, let alone be hateful towards anyone (except conservatives).
In 1 year of being on Lemmy, I think this post is the first one to bring up the topic of identity of Fediverse participants in any form (besides an OP if identity is the original topic).
(Maybe I've just managed to steer clear of communities that exist solely to discuss identity hatred?)
AFAIAC, y'all are genderless, faceless, amorphous thought bubbles writing words that compete exclusively on the merits of the weight of their arguments. Y'all might as well be LLMs, whose identity is essentially an NVIDIA card and whatever corner of the internet was scrapped. Anyway... The identity of commenters has no place on the fediverse. They are either off topic, ad hominem, or anecdotal data points exclusively (again, original topics of identity being a distinct exception).
Headline so stupid I almost clicked to see wtf they were talking about...
Then I realized it's op posting their own blog.
Apologies if I'm talking out of turn, I want to do my best to be a good ally but I recognize that I've got some serious blind spots!
With that caveat in mind, I would suggest that the problem making fedi unwelcoming is two-pronged:
1 ) It looks to me that fedi inherited the original sin of microblogging, which is that the system naturally rewards the spiciest hot takes that go with the local social currents.
2 ) Fedi's culture was established by FOSS geeks rebelling against for-profit social media.
This has led to most instances becoming machines for manufacturing hot takes are going to have an unacceptably high mayonnaise content, highlighting the importance of your points 1 and 2! Nerds have to learn to slow down and think before shooting their mouth off, but it's so tough to cut through the weird high school grievance politics.
(That mindset is a big part of what generated the whole problematic LessWrong/Techfash wave; your post fits in nicely with awful.system's core mission!)
My impression is that Twitter avoided this because it was initially colonized by a more representative cross-section of society. This can be somewhat remediated via your points 3 and 4, but will face resistance -- which kind of kills the fun of using fediverse for so many of the fedi-curious. This is a big problem when people can just go to bsky or whatever and find much of their old Twitter network already setting up shop and reconnecting with their communities.
Thankfully, some individual instances (like awful!) seem to get it, but for the most part the poison is already baked in, and it's hard to unbake a cake and begin again. It will also be tough to get the existing core fedi community to understand that no level of "technical excellence" can fix what is fundamentally a social issue. Unlike baseball ghosts, actual people are under no obligation to come just because you built it!
Other than the kind of long, tough reckoning that society as a whole needs to face, it's tough to see an answer. Do you think it would be possible to somehow begin and again have a "second genesis" of fedi, now that the wider world is more invested in finding alternatives to "big social?"
Thanks for working on this!
Thanks for the perspectives. Agreed that it's fundamentally a social issue.Fedi's culture has evolved a lot over time; Before Mastodon: GNU social and the early fediverse has quotes and links from back in the day, including discusison of the 2016 wave of channers and GamerGaters joining GnuSocial. The 2016-7 Mastodon wave was very different, a lot of queer and trans people, but also had major problems with race -- the article links to "Dogpiling, weaponized content warning discourse, and a fig leaf for mundane white supremacy" which has a bunch of discussion and links about that. So it got whiter. Flash forward and there's the 2022/23 wave of people looking for a Twitter alternative ... a lot of Black people looking at Mastodon were greeted by the N word so unsurprisingly didn't stick around; many white people had more positive experiences, and talked about how nice everybody was, So it got whiter. Then there was mid-2024 wave of Redditors ... what are the demographics of the people who came? The people who stayed? So I'm not sure it's primarily a matter of miroblogging being a machine for manufacturing hot takes.
I certainly think there's an opportunity for changing the dynamics. One possible direction is a split between regions that are actively working on it, and get better over time, and regions that are business as usual, with fairly weak connections between them. Time will tell!
I hear ya, fair points!
Oh, one thing I have seen minority folks ask for (and be ignored+condescended at about!) is better moderation tools. It's tough to moderate big instances, particularly when under direct attack by malicious users.
Edit: oops, you've got it covered. Apologies for, in fact, being that guy!
Thankfully, some individual instances (like awful!) seem to get it, but for the most part the poison is already baked in, and it’s hard to unbake a cake and begin again.
I think the biggest problem is either the lack of active moderation or, if present, moderators which are too lenient. Not that I blame anyone who thinks that removing the fifteenth racist asshat for the day is not the best use of their time, but the best communities are the ones that to make the effort to keep it clean.
This has been true since the days of Usenet. The good groups were completely moderated to the point where some person had to manually approve every single posted article. It worked (as long as the mods weren't racist asshats themselves, which is a different problem), but in contrast, almost the entire alt. hierarchy was an unmoderated cesspit and to anyone who doesn't know how that turned out long-term: good for you.
Luckily I think we are seeing a rise in moderated communities again. After Usenet and dedicated forums it somehow fell out of fashion (with 4chan and Reddit being the pinnacle of using but muh free speech! to give bigots a platform). Maybe it's confirmation bias, but I do see many fedi instances who have stricter rules again and seem to enforce them in an attempt to create welcoming communities for everyone. I hope this trend continues.
This is a great analysis.
It also brings up fond memories of poptart artfully launching nazis out the saloon door in ye olden days. Hope he's doing well these days!
Weak moderation on many instances -- including large ones like mastodon.social -- is a big problem, but I wouldn't say it's the biggest. Black people even on well-moderated instances get plenty of racist abuse -- the moderation tools are horrible, and basic tools that peopl on Twitter have to protect themselves don't even exist. Agreed though that many fedi instances do have stricter rules and make a real effort to enforce them ... that's a good thing!
I think your point about moderation tooling is worth a bullet point on its own. I think more tools for users to stay safe and for moderators to keep their instance safe would go a long way, and that there are people who would be willing and able to donate their time implementing them.
Also, the current draft is still pretty focused on Mastodon. I think it's worth talking more about how the problems (and solutions) are different on different platforms, or if not then talk about working on the problem for Mastodon/microblogging as opposed to "the fediverse."
Thanks for the feedback! The revised draft will talk about Lemmy as well. I've talked about the software aspects in a lot of other posts (Mastodon and today's fediverse are unsafe by design and unsafe by default, for example, and there's a section on it Don't tell people "it's easy", and seven more things Kbin, Lemmy, and the fediverse can learn from Mastodon so don't want to go into it here, but maybe I'll add a link!
I clicked a few of the links in the blog post and they were about Mastodon, which I don't use, so I didn't examine them closely. Is this also a problem on Lemmy? I haven't noticed, but I'm probably poorly attuned compared to people who are affected directly.
Yes, there are similar problems on Lemmy. Have a look at the comments in some of the crossposts for examples (although mods have cleaned up a lot of stuff in the beehaw thread).
I see. Yeah I've heard not so good things about Beehaw and I know lemmy.world has disconnected (defederated) from it. The Fediverse isn't one big uniform place. You might be happier hanging out here on lemmy.world which tries to give a friendly experience for the most part. I'm here most of the time, but am also on lemmy.ml sometimes.
This is the cringest thing I've seen all month outside Hexbear.
off you fuck
The fediverses biggest problem is that people don’t use enough Linux. If that is not the most white middle class problem I don’t know what is.
Why do people think the fediverse is not filled with majority white people?
reading this post gave me whiplash