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!
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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.
posting here did attract a lot of worked examples of why we need this of course
“hey fucker come prove me right” can be an underrated but important part of the writing process
Yeah. Funny how that works!