5 things white people can do to start making the fediverse less toxic for Black people
privacy.thenexus.today
Anti-Blackness is a long-term problem in the fediverse. Now's a good time to start changing that.

Feedback welcome! Here’s the TL;DR list

  1. Listen more to more Black people
  2. Post less – and think before you post
  3. Call in, call out, and/or report anti-Blackness when you see it
  4. Support Black people and Black-led instances and projects

Other suggestions?

  • acausal_masochist@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    4 months ago

    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.”

  • mortemtyrannis@lemmy.mlEnglish
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    4 months ago

    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 reverse is not filled with majority white people?

    • luciole (he/him)@beehaw.orgEnglish
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      4 months ago

      I think the second point is quite important, but I do suggest to OP to clarify. My take is that if all you’ve got about a social issue is some gut reaction, and that you’re neither concerned nor learned on the subject, you could do worse than to shut up and listen. (And reading titles off some feed is not learning.)

      Does the fediverse have a problem with too much posting? 🤔

      There is more to a community than volume.

      • The Nexus of Privacy@lemmy.blahaj.zoneOPEnglish
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        4 months ago

        Thanks. The article discusses this some, including

        If you’re white, you’re almost certainly not an expert on anti-Blackness – on the fediverse or more generally. This means that your initial thoughts and questions on this subject are almost certainly going to be things many others have said before. So even if they’re good questions or ideas, they’re not particularly helpful and (since many Black people hear the same thing again and again) may well be annoying. And very often they’re not particularly good questions or ideas – or you’ll express them in a way that contributes to the fediverse’s anti-Blackness.

        And then has several examples. That said, improvement is needed – the text of the section doesn’t completely align with the headline – so suggestions welcome!

        • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
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          4 months ago

          The design of ActivityPub (or at least Mastodon) doesn’t exactly help here either, given that you can’t see most of the replies unless you click through to the original instance.

          It’s way too easy to leave a reply to a post without realizing that 30 other people have already said the exact same thing. So when I wan’t to avoid being repetitive I have to remember to click through.

  • givesomefucks@lemmy.worldEnglish
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    4 months ago

    Headline so stupid I almost clicked to see wtf they were talking about…

    Then I realized it’s op posting their own blog.

  • Sanctus@lemmy.worldEnglish
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    4 months ago

    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.

      • Vytle@lemmy.worldEnglish
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        4 months ago

        No on god I agree with sanctus. I’m a triple minority and I have not seen any bigotry on the fediverse.

        • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
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          4 months ago

          just because you don’t see it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist

          it might mean your mods do a great job, it might be that you don’t hang out in communities that draw chuds, it might be any many more things! it definitely means you don’t see the whole fedi at once.

          but this shit does still exist

    • The Nexus of Privacy@lemmy.blahaj.zoneOPEnglish
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      4 months ago

      From the very beinning of the article, in the quote from tillshadeisgone:

      “In recent days, folks such as @ErickaSimone@mastodon.social, @KimCrayton1@dair-community.social, @timnitGebru@dair-community.social … 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.

      • SkyNTP@lemmy.mlEnglish
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        4 months ago

        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).

  • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
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    4 months ago

    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!

    • Mii@awful.systemsEnglish
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      4 months ago

      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.

      • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
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        4 months ago

        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!

      • The Nexus of Privacy@lemmy.blahaj.zoneOPEnglish
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        4 months ago

        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!

    • The Nexus of Privacy@lemmy.blahaj.zoneOPEnglish
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      4 months ago

      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!

      • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
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        4 months ago

        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.

    • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
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      4 months ago

      You’re just being asked to be thoughtful. Is that so awful?

      We’re at an inflection point where millions of people might be able to break free of the big social media companies. It has to be worth their while to jump to fedi, but if it’s a hassle, they’re just going to go somewhere else like bsky or Threads, and then we’ll all be locked into the Wheel of Pain for another decade or so until that platform enshitifies.

      You’re really illustrating the problem the OP is trying to fix quite nicely.

      • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
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        4 months ago

        You’re just being asked to be thoughtful before opening your mouth. Is that so awful?

        Mate you’re basically denying the whole identity of a certain kind of poster, if opening their mouth required thoughtfullness they’d be forever silent and turn to dust