tl;dr (but please read)
"The tools, protocols and culture of the fediverse were built by trans and queer feminists."
"The culture and technical systems were deliberately designed on principles of consent, agency, and community safety."
I question the author's premise that trans and queer people built the Fediverse. I've met many CIS developers over the years who wanted a more FOSS-based, scalable technology, and were not
remotely focused on protecting sensibilities from being triggered by communication with the rest of the world.
And I just find it odd that people who insisted they had a better model for social networks, are now deeply disturbed that millions suddenly agree.
The simple answer for people who feel overwhelmed by their success is simply ban everyone from existing servers (with some advanced warning, please).
New servers will replace them. All fixed!
Respectfully, that sounds anecdotal. Is there evidence to support it? And even if true, what's the relevance of it? Mad props for the contributions to humanity, but those features are useful to any community now. Those who invent or built things, (technical, social, and theistic) throughout history have often thought they can control who uses their inventions, and how they use them. It almost never works as they expect.
@shoq @irwin Oh great, we have entered the "find objective proof" phase of the internet discussion. It's like the [this is wrong/irrelevant/I've always said this] stages of scientific acceptance.
You realize the topic you're responding to is "this was a safe haven for queer, trans and otherwise marginalized people, and that is now under threat", and the only thing you focus on is "wHaT aBoUt CiS FOSS DeVeLoPeRs' CoNtRiBuTiOns tO tHe fEdIvErse"? As if we CIS people have anything to worry about.
@vanderZwan @irwin
Sorry, but the post I responded to, and the reason I responded to it, don't align well with your strawman characterization. I will respond if you reframe it as discussion, and not a beacon meant to attract dogpiles.
I've been to this rodeo.
@shoq @vanderZwan @irwin Shoq, wow, our paths haven't crossed since your attempts to get rid of #p2's diversity focus back in the day. Hiiiiii!
Yes there's plenty of evidence that queer- and trans-friendly features like content warnings were designed built by queer and trans users. For example, 2017's "Lessons (so far) from Mastodon", which also links out to some primary sources
@vanderZwan @shoq @irwin @jdp23
Thanks for sharing these blogs 💜 I really appreciate that 5 years ago mastodon was self-describing as 'twitter without nazis'. That's how I've described it to my friends since I joined.
But within I week I've gone from 'why is there no QT/everyone should join' to 'thank god there's no QT and I'm not telling anyone else'.
Not to say I fully get what the community is going through, but I 💯 hear you
@jdp23 @vanderZwan @irwin
I never tried to do that all. I tried to make others realize that #p2 could be a larger community for the public Liberal good, and you simply reacted like that I was some threat to your papacy.
The core issue for me is how the needs of everyone, not just marginalized communities, can be protected from abuse, without trampling on our collective ability to express ourselves without armies of hall monitors dogpiling us.
Give it tme. More servers will serve everyone.
Right, that's the core disagreement now as it was then. I think you get to something that works for everybody by prioritizing the desires and needs of marginalized communities. You think it's just as important to prioritize privileged cis white people.
More servers with cis white admins catering to cis white audiences -- like the mostly-white mostly-cis "suggested follows" on most servers -- serve some people more than others.
@vanderZwan @irwin Background here: #p2 was a progressive Twitter hashtag Tracy Viselli and I started back in 2009 with an explicit goal of using Twitter to engage with communities that were marginalized by the progressive blogosphere.
Shoq thought that was scary to a lot of white people (true) and the "public Liberal good" would be better served by making it less explicitly diversity focused.
Straw, Jon, Where did I prioritize white audiences, simply because I am not prioritizing those who want to blot out offensive and triggering speech with solutions that simply cannot and will not scale?
They are already failing to scale, which is precisely why we're having this discussion now. Why can't we all just agree that we're all about to learn about and build something new, and try to be at least respectful of everyone's needs and views as we work it out?
@irwin It reminds me a lot of a phenomena here in Austin where, if you moved here more than seven years ago, you are required by law to complain about all the new people moving here and wrecking the place. Just like people complained about people like you when you first moved here.
I get it. But I've also been using the internet fairly regularly since 1988.
@arclight @irwin sort of, but I don't think what the article describes is quite the same thing as Eternal September (which is a get-off-my-lawn thing, like you said).
The phenomenon of "small internet forum goes viral and gets overrun with tourists who don't get or care about the subculture" has been a thing for ages.
It's why the best subreddits tend to be the ones with the heaviest moderation: they filter out most of the people who don't care about what the core point of the subreddit is.
@arclight @irwin I'm not sure if you're talking about last week on Mastodon, your experience in Austin, or something else.
Anyway, unless you actually represent a minority who has to worry about their safe space being taken away from them, saying that you haven't experienced this is basically just describing the privilege of not ever being at the receiving end that kind of bigotry, no?
Speaking as a white-passing hetero cis-male person who also only experiences these things indirectly
@peepstein @irwin i dont know the entire backstory but did read this thread on it: https://bananachips.club/@nev/109294468863000432
which kicked off, naturally, some discussion on what journalists should be doing on here, how it is and is not like twitter, etc.
@irwin It feels that the whole point of this federated system is that if people from group A (old-timers) don't like what people from group B do (newcomers), there's always a way to separate their servers to two weakly connected subnetworks. There may be "old-rite" servers that don't federate with "new-rite" servers, both groups happy. No?
Say, there are servers now that support LaTeX, and those that don't. Maybe that's ok? (Just thinking aloud :)
@irwin "It's hardly surprising that the sorts of people who have been targets for harrassment by fascist trolls for most of their lives built in protections against unwanted attention when they created a new social media toolchain."
Have those protections really been built in though? Maybe I don't know enough about them, but to me the security measures seem just slightly better than twitter's.
@irwin "and starting to draft new Rules and Terms of Use for the server to make explicit things that previously "everybody knew" implicitly because we previously could acculturate people one by one."
Why didn't they just close registrations?
@irwin "Someone else had posted a screenshot of it on Twitter. Nobody thought to ask if I wanted that."
They shouldn't have done that but it's also naive to post things publicly on the internet for many years, don't close it off at all, and then be surprised when people eventually abuse that it's public.
@irwin this is an interesting read, but it's also like.. yes, as something goes from small to big it changes, that's natural; the best you can try to do is control how it changes.
But also, this is just analogous to someone's blog post being widely shared, if it's public & good, people will want to share.
@josh @irwin Yes. You see that with CWs. One newcomer renamed it to Content Wrappers, got a bunch of feedback, changed his mind and deleted the toot.
If, however, you get an influx of people that keep renaming the thing faster than you can explain the whats and hows, you’ll “lose” it.
What stings are people who flee Twitter for its hostility but tell you to “just accept that things are going to change” without doing any effort to adapt.
That attitude is what makes Twitter a hellscape.
@irwin Nice article. I gently suggested to a fellow twitter migrant who was suggesting building 'real' communities, that there already are 'real' communities here and promptly got chided by a twitter big hitter.
I suspect the lack of dopamine hits on Masto will result in a slow reverse trickle for many.
Irwin, thank you for the share, gave me some things to think about as a new user and an interesting thread to read!
Liz, you make a good point there! I do wonder though if the new platform won't...deprogram... many of the new users as they discover the new dopamine hit from actual human engagement and conversation rather the being churned through a dopamine mill by a larger company intent on making them a product?
😄 "Twitter Big Hitters"
I remember several of them flouncing after a week or so, during earlier influxes from over there. I look forward to them doing so again, and soon. They're annoying and demanding as hell and I'm here *precisely* because I'm not interested in their antics or how they think I should be living my online life. 😴
It is really important that people use the CW button a lot (for discussions of politics, sexuality, etc). People must learn to behave.
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