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?

  • The Nexus of Privacy@lemmy.blahaj.zoneOPEnglish
    13·
    3 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
      8·
      3 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.

      Edit: oops, you’ve got it covered. Apologies for, in fact, being that guy!