This is not to appeal to a "poverty model" or an "incapacity model" where marginalized communities are concerned, but to point out the very real resource dependencies necessary for a marginalized group to run an instance.

Beyond technical resources and monetary resources, two things which have been covered in the previous litigations of this suggestion by marginalized mastodonians, there are also personnel resources as well, by which I mean moderators.

Any marginalized community or instance will require a greater number of personnel to maintain itself than an instance not focused on their needs. This is for the simple fact that marginalized communities, be it digital or physical, exist in a world that is actively hostile to their flourishing.

I am not being hyperbolic in this statement: I am being truthful and factual.

In a digital space, the threat is magnified in some pretty ugly ways. This magnification consequently requires people to "stand at the gates" of a given instance to defend it from trolls of a variety of stripes.

Put simply, you need a metaphorical "warrior caste" to enable the safety and security of the community, to deal with the assholes in ways that enable the community to persist in the space. You need moderators.

Moderation, as an endless number of academic studies have indicated, is not an easy task.

It is made harder when one is a marginalized subject and is tasked with engaging with the kinds of vitriol directed at your community as part of your responsibility. To this end, any sufficiently large instance on the fediverse will need people to commit themselves to the task of moderation. This is a massive sacrifice made by volunteers.

Still further, there is the implication that the solution to harassment within a community, to being unable to be "at home" with others is to go elsewhere.

This ignores what makes Black Twitter what it is and what makes communities on social media what they are. We're not necessarily looking for separate but equal (as if that's even fucking possible): we're looking to be ourselves in all our fullness in public.

Now, the metaphor is imprecise because of the federated nature of the fediverse, but still, it tracks in some crucial senses. One of the thing an instance of color will make possible is, say, banning the whole fucking instance to prevent conversations about racism from leaking into whiter instances.

I'm not saying white people need to be involved in these conversations, but come the fuck on.

If enough of these instances are made uncomfortable by the hypothetical federated black instance, and that discomfort results in mass blocking of the instance, then the instance becomes a weird island isolated from the fediverse.

Which is... not great, but certainly possible given the prevailing cultural norms among instances.

This is not to say that instances focused on marginalized experience should not exist, but it is to say that some of these takes ignore the high cost that starting these things imposes on the moderators and the members of the instance.

"Build your own instance" is not the solution that many think it is.