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.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/15011909

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?

  • sabreW4K3@lazysoci.alEnglish
    0·
    3 months ago

    The Fediverse does have a massive white slant and the default experience isn’t very embracing of different cultures.

    There’s a bunch of people who would like to see things improved and as of yet, there’s not much consensus. The only real idea I’ve seen floated thus far is blocklist subscriptions.

    A massive part of the problem as I see it is, and don’t get me wrong, this is a symptom, not a root cause, people are inclined to use the wrong tools. Mastodon is a microblog and yet people are determined to use it for groups and nuanced conversation where their instance only supports 400 characters.

    Also WriteFreely is the only active blog service in the Fediverse and needs some love.

    We need to encourage people to move to tools that better fit their needs and desires and honestly part of the problem with that is that people feel they’ll lose their interactions/audience and that is about Mastodon being shit, because while they can focus on making things more seamless with Lemmy and soon to be Discourse, NodeBB, etc. They’re seemingly not willing to.

    In regards to Lemmy specifically. Lemmy has a problem. You can see that by the fact this has been voted down to oblivion. When people treat ALL like a personal subscription feed and vote down things they’re not interested in or dislike, it creates a monoculture. And no, I’m not saying don’t downvote things, but there’s a difference between voting down something because it’s not great in a community and because you’re trying to curate ALL. Maybe a solution is to add local/subscribed only voting options for communities. Lemmy needs to learn to embrace things that aren’t for you and sometimes, in fact most times, that’s as simple as saying, “that’s not for me, I’ll ignore it.”

    • sabreW4K3@lazysoci.alEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      Also, while we’re here. Let’s call out instances that don’t update their Lemmy version because they want to make a point, even though doing so would bring quality of life improvements to black community members. Looking at you Beehaw and even Lemmy World.

      Also Lemmy.ml for turning into fuck ups. Being the second largest instance, especially one that was less mainstream in their beliefs, they just had to keep doing them. They were never going to be popular, but different and well run was enough. Then they started making questionable decisions and not explaining them. Which, being that they’re so well read, know never ends well. They had more time on their hands and started being overly involved in the instance and that hurts their community members in ways in which they’re too up their arse to take stock of. Step away from the admin panel, let your moderators moderate.

      • MrKaplan@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        3 months ago

        Us not upgrading has nothing to do with making a point.

        We’re aiming to run a stable instance, which can come at the cost of delayed updates.

        We didn’t update to 0.19.4, and a few weeks later 0.19.5 was released with a number of critical bugfixes.

        0.19.6 will have several more fixes for issues introduced in 0.19.4+, such as a fix for remote moderators updating local communities, allowing admins to filter modlog entries by moderator, as well as some performance issues reported by other instances.

        We usually wait for other instances to run the latest version for some time to allow bug reports to surface before we update ourselves.

  • Teknikal@eviltoast.orgEnglish
    0·
    3 months ago

    I honestly don’t get it, to me I just see user IDs I haven’t the slightest clue what race someone is or isn’t on here. I vote solely based on whether they make a good point or a bad point.

    • smallpatatas@lemm.eeEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      This may be true of your own experience on Lemmy, but on microblogging software such as Mastodon it is most definitely not the case.

        • The Nexus of Privacy@lemmy.blahaj.zoneOPEnglish
          0·
          3 months ago

          The community is called “Fediverse”, and this is about the fediverse, so yes it is the correct audience.

          And there’s plenty of anti-Blackness on Lemmy. In fact there’s even a bunch of anti-Blackness in this thread – as somebody on another instance said, it’s illustrates why other instances have defederated lemmy.world! So, if you’re looking for examples, have a look at this thread.

          • danekrae@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            3 months ago

            In fact there’s even a bunch of anti-Blackness in this thread

            Could you help me find the comments you are referring to? I can’t seem to find them, and I’m worried it might be because I’m subconsciously anti-Blackness

            • The Nexus of Privacy@lemmy.blahaj.zoneOPEnglish
              0·
              3 months ago

              If you can’t find them, then (like many people) that’s a sign you’re used to an environment where anti-Blackness is normalized. So, imagine a Black person reading this thread who’s been targeted by racism on the fediverse. What comments would they think are dismissive of Black people?