Right, so: I get a lot of these kinds of replies. Not to dunk on Nemo, but the general tendency of telling folks to start their own instance with all of the features we want ignores crucial things that marginalized communities often lack: time and resources.

https://corteximplant.com/@nemo/109351863643584265

☄️Nemo (@[email protected])

@[email protected] i'd add that mastodon is not the fediverse, and that black community don't HAVE TO join mastodon. They could fork it and make it their own, or use a soft that maybe already contains the ability (i have no idea if that exists but hey ...) And by that mean forge the tool they need to build these communities out of harm way, with the affordances you deem are necessary. They could do it. And if it federates, it doesn't even have to be closed to the rest. How crazy is that.

CORTEX IMPLANT — a cyberpunk'ish fediverse instance!

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.

Offline, in the US, we might take the increase in racist violence, the attacks on LGBTQ legislation, the attacks on gender affirming care, the rampant transphobia in academia, the ableist attacks on Fetterman during his campaign, and all the run of the mill micro and macro-aggressions that are part of being a marginalized person in the US as evidence of our constant state of being under threat.

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.

I would further argue that this sacrifice would be outsized for multiply marginalized subjects. Consider, for example, a parallel to the outsized advising load that faculty of color endure for the sake of supporting students of color. This is pretty much a similar experience that any moderator on an instance of color will face.

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.

@shengokai That last sentence is one of the things I most miss about Twitter here on the flipside: hearing marginalized people speak frankly about lived experiences that would normally have been all but invisible to me. Hoping to find that here in time — and to help •create• (an active verb implying work) the space for it. Glad to have found your account.