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?
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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.
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.
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!
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.
Yep. It probably accentuates Reply Guy-ism too. The underlying issues are social; technology can make things worse. This article focuses on the social aspects but I talked about some of AP’s issues in the “And it’s about the protocol too” section of Steps towards a Safer Fediverse
Oh wait there’s a link! I thought this was a self post. Sorry for that 😅
Headline so stupid I almost clicked to see wtf they were talking about…
Then I realized it’s op posting their own blog.
where precisely do you imagine you found the rule that they’re not allowed to post their own blog?
If there was a rule I violated, my apologies! But I also didn’t see anything about it.
you’re fine; there’s no rules against your post, and we’ve never seen that poster before (and good news — now we never will again!)
unfortunately, a thread about the racism experienced by Black folks on the fediverse will attract weird, racist reactions from random posters
Thanks much! And yeah, comes with the territory. Check out the discussion on lemmy.world - https://lemmy.world/post/18261593
NotANaziIWasJustBornIn1988 - 24 points
Yikes, OK I already regret clicking that link.
Yeah I saw the name and … no thanks.
Sharing your own work is fine.
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.
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.
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).
tl;dr there’s no racism problem because you see everyone as a white man by default
Well said. Can I quote you in the revised draft?
so what you’re saying is that people shouldn’t be their whole selves in your presence because it makes you uncomfortable.
what quaint, 90s flavored racism this is
it can stay in the 90s
yes, there’s a fuckton of racism on the fediverse. are you new?
replying to your questions/points in order of appearance: yes; go to hell; get in the sea.
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.
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?
This is definitely a pathology at this point.
Should I also give myself several lashings in repentance?
You’re just being asked to be thoughtful before opening your mouth. 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. People are disgusted at the incumbents and are looking for someplace, anyplace to land.
Unfortunately, “Don’t be a dick” is in the critical path to success for the fediverse, We, the currently existing community, have to make it worth their while to jump to fedi, because if it’s a hassle, they’re just going to go somewhere else like bsky or Threads. Then we’ll all dragged along via network effects, riding the Wheel of Pain for another decade or so until that platform enshitifies and we maybe get another bite at the apple
You’re really illustrating the problem the OP is trying to fix quite nicely.
Instead of dropping a turd on our doorstep, why not have a policy of not commenting on stuff in places that you don’t really belong, like an normal person would in their regular life.
BTW, having a fedi-wide stream of popular posts was a mistake.
no I’ll do it for you
tbh it looks like that whole lemmy instance is pure lolbertarian trash.
With that domain name, who could have predicted?
I was honestly gonna defed just by the domain name alone but I was finally able to check out their instance and hoo boy of course there’s a Nazi-looking skull logo
