5 things white people can do to start making the fediverse less toxic for Black people
5 things white people can do to start making the fediverse less toxic for Black people
Anti-Blackness is a long-term problem in the fediverse. Now's a good time to start changing that.
Here's the list:
- Listen more to more Black people – and amplify their voices
- 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
- Approach it intersectionally
The full article goes into detail, and also has links to anti-racism resources and appendices with a list of common mistakes to avoid and blocklist resources for moderators.
Thanks to everybody who gave feedback on earlier drafts!
a goddamn masterpiece
you arent doing anyone any favors by calling point 2 just "post less" when the actual point of the article is: if you are white, post less about race, and think more before you post
that doesn’t seem like a particularly good representation of the actual point of the article to me. here’s the article author’s own summary of point 2:
Of course, the combination of deciding not to post in some circumstances, and taking more time to think and work on the wording of the posts you do make, means that you'll post less ... but that's not a bad thing. The posts you make will be higher quality, and are likely to lead to better discussions. And, posting less also opens up space for you to amplify more Black voices.
Thanks for pointing that out! But, I got enough pushback on the wording of point 2 that I changed it to just "Think before you post"
Point 1 is suspect too. Black people have no incentive to let people know they're black on the fediverse.
this libertarian-flavored version of “there’s no racism on the fediverse because I haven’t noticed any” is somehow even stupider
Neat, a double strange loop of a bad take!
Poster considers "Listen more to more Black people – and amplify their voices" a suspect point, and failing to listen further, misinterprets the advice and makes a non sequitur counterpoint.
Poster implies qualms with point "Post less – and think before you post" as well, and accordingly posts without thinking much at all.
That's some self-consistent jackassery right there.
FYI: I'm posting a non-sneer without an NSFW tag. I suspect that you might want to post this sort of article in the sister community !NotAwfulTech for non-sneering feedback; this community is explicitly for "big brain tech dude" authors who are posting "yet another clueless take."
While it would be pleasingly recursive to look at this article as such a "clueless take," I think it's clearly more well-researched than that. Also, while I personally don't like the concept of white allyship, I understand why it emerges: it takes longer to let go of one's beliefs than to embrace the people around you, and so it takes longer to let go of whiteness than to be okay with non-white folks. So, I'm not going to take that angle. I don't think it's okay to be white, but I also think that it takes a while for white folks to realize that they can stop being white.
With that all in mind, I think that it's worth pointing out that while all five suggestions are laudable, none of them address the structural and reputational problems at the heart of Mastodon. @sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems had a killer comment on the last draft (which I can't permalink because Lemmy is trash; it's in this tree) about how ActivityPub structurally allows harassment by allowing pseudonymous interactions. In my personal conversations with ActivityPub's architects, I got the sense that they didn't understand what we call The Reputation Problem: the paths via which you give reputational incentives to participants will be reinforced according to their rewards. This is also the root of my pessimism about related projects like Spritely Goblins.
(This reminds me that I need to flesh out the bullet point in my notes headlined "The Reputation Problem & A Theory of Generalized Fuckwittery". This generalizes the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, Homo economicus, etc. It's all obviously connected from a distributed-systems perspective: bad actors are getting paid for their bad actions by the system's structure!)
Further, it's not clear that the community's adaptations are sustainable. TBS can't seem to shed its TERFs and it should be obvious that any similarly-structured project will be too authoritarian for a large chunk of the community. Hashtags aren't private or moderated spaces, and any sort of hashtag usage council would immediately run into the same authoritarian issues. One of the disadvantages of Balkanization is that your neighbors, safely separated from you by geographic obstacles, will start talking shit about you, and you don't want to let them police your lands.
The inscrutable NSFW rule you seem to be such a stickler for for some equally inscrutable reason has been repealed! Go in peace.
Holy shit the person who replied to you has this in their post history:
Some YouTube channels for children are uploading obscene videos.
According to the article, the videos feature nudity and possibly sexual harassment. Sexual harassment is unfortunately a fact of life, and it’s probably better that children recognise it, and see it condemned in the media they watch, than not know what it is at all. And you would have to be a puritan to think that children seeing naked people is somehow so terrible.
Along with sealioning and a bunch of AI (like him being so excited about that recent deep fake stuff). In the last few days I've seen a lot of racist and transphobe shit on lemmy, despite having blocked quite a few people over my stay and comment sections being barren as a result
when we get a super bad take on an awful.systems sub, we tend to check their comment history in case they're just having a bad moment. you will be unsurprised to hear that when it's a bad take on race, it's generally certain we rapidly find reason to ban them from the sub instantly.
Thanks much for the detailed response ... I didn't realize the purpose of this community. Somebody had suggested I post the draft here, which I did, and now I realize that their suggestion was a snarky trap that I fell for 🤣. Oh well, joke's on them (as well as me), I got good feedback on the draft here.
Agreed that there are structural problems with AP; I wrote about this in And it's about the protocol, too. But even though software improvements can help, the underlying problem's cultural.
I intentionally didn't phrase it in terms of allyship (in fact I'm pretty sure the word "ally" doesn't even appear in the article) ... still, I don't think white folks (me included) can stop being white, nor should we -- we are who we are, and that's okay. I do think we (again including me) can make more of an effort to deal with our default attitudes and behaviors, and try to use our privilege for good.
happy to see the draft get fleshed out. good writeup
As someone who is not a US citizen, I can't understand what it's all about. How could someone tell the color of the person who is participating? For me, everybody is just the same, and I can only judge them for what they're saying, not who they are.
- Listen more to more Black people – and amplify their voices;
Isn't it already done independently of the skin color of the person?
- Post less – and think before you post
I can only guess this point is lacking context.
- Call in, call out, and/or report anti-Blackness when you see it
I can't say I have seen it, and I believe it happens a lot, so I guess people are reporting. That's the better point of the list!
- Support Black people and Black-led instances and projects
If the message is good and promotes equality, normal people gravitate to it. Racist people will not care regardless of this text.
- Approach it intersectionally
What?
there’s an entire article attached you didn’t read before you decided to post this pointless nonsense, and the link’s right after the parts you quoted
what, you mean we have to read things before we spew opinions about them? what an utterly odious requirement! admins! help! I am being oppressed!
((......oh god I hope this joke is helped to land by dint of domain.....))
I think OP might have a stalker, this level of attention from weird nerds is bizarre.
Pretty trash points ngl. Written from privilege imo.
go fuck yourself imo