If Black Twitter emerged as offline Black discursive practices leveraging Twitter's technological affordances (cf. Brock, 'Distributed Blackness') then migrating this collective to Mastodon, i.e. anti-Twitter will be fraught.

I am also struck by Flowers' framing of Black Twitter as a "gathering place" & "commons." This is an American luxury. Indian Twitter is a morass of censorship, RW trolls, misogyny, hate speech. Mastodon has been a respite for many who don't experience Twitter as a commons.

I get that Black Twitter is uninterested in Global South encounters with racist, fascist hate speech, but that also reveals Black Twitter's fundamentally American gaze.

Even more American is this framing of "Marginalized users self-moderating will subject themselves to violence." Who is currently moderating violent content on Twitter? Marginalized Global South workers, employed in highly precarious Big Tech fronts in far-flung corners of Asia.

Mastodon does have to figure out the various avatars of anti-Black discourse here & train mods to catch them swiftly & effectively, but with non-American volunteers serving as mods, the valence of American anti-Blackness is going to take some time & resources to figure out.

And just as a caveat, I'm not necessarily a Mastodon fan. It's a platform still in the making. I'm just wary of dismissing its potential just yet. And yes, I'm a little tired of American Twitter always on my TL.👀