@lawyerjsd
How do you mean "wait, what?"

That comes over as though you might possibly be thinking it's nonsense - is that how you meant it?

Or is it more that you want someone to walk you through the previous conversation that's been running for a long time about Black people's experiences of the Fediverse?

@lawyerjsd @mekkaokereke @lewriley @dave @Bam @thetitanborn Harassment is very difficult to track on large instances because most of the time it's done in private messages and the rest are a flood of micro aggressions just subtle enough not to appear racist to moderators.

And local timelines on large instances go so fast that people can never notice that stuff. The only people who notice are the folks experiencing it, and the attackers.

So by the time you document one attack enough to get a single person banned, other 30 are still harassing you. It's an uphill battle and eventually you give up and move to another server or quit mastodon altogether.

So BIPOC folks would need to organize to barely counter this shit, but how to organize when the very tool you need to organize is becoming the tool that harassers use against you?

So, you got what, 10, 20 mods on a server that has over 200,000 users?

A tiny moderation team on a server that large is not gonna do shit.

@lewriley @dave @Bam @thetitanborn

The paradox is: you only know about my experience and that of other Black users, because we refuse to play the little "Stepford Wives content warning game" when talking about what happened to us on this idyllic little platform. And you don't know how widespread the problem is, because of Mastodon design choices: crappy search, CWs, weaponized politeness, rejection of the very idea of screening servers for moderation.

@mekkaokereke

Both of those scenarios suck. What hurts for me as a white person is that far too many other white folks still don't understand or believe that Black folks face a constant barrage of "little" things (little as in perceived less than overt racism and death threats) on a daily basis. The casual and systemic varieties of racism.

I struggle to find ways to get other white folks to understand that someone else's lived experience can be just as real and genuine even though they've never experienced it. Heck, it's been challenging for my past self too.

I've lived in the Midwest my whole life, so no experience with earthquakes or hurricanes, but even though I've never been directly affected by either doesn't mean that hurricanes and earthquakes are not real or are not deadly. Few would argue that hurricanes aren't real, yet many will try to argue that systemic or casual racism isn't real, isn't common, or isn't just as (if not more) impactful.

To help myself understand things I sometimes think of buckets. I think of an analogy with filling up a 5 gallon bucket. If you try to dump 6 gallons into a 5 gallon bucket all at once, it'll certainly splash everywhere, run over, and be a get everywhere. It happens really rapidly and everyone around can witness the violence as the water spills everywhere. To me this is overt racism like N*zis?

But if someone slowly pours liquid into that same 5 gallon bucket over time, it's still gonna fill up and eventually reach a point of overflow. It may not be as immediately jarring or rapid, but that bucket will still be full, weighing a person down, no relief in sight. And if the person or system fills that bucket really carefully, nobody will even notice the bucket getting full, except for the person holding the bucket.

@Callistobeast @lewriley @dave @Bam @thetitanborn

You're talking, not listening.

"Use CW" does stop you from hearing it, because some Black users get blocked for not using CWs, but more just leave for social networks that are better for Black folk.

Yes, I know about Fediblock. Doesn't help if when I joined, mastodon.cloud wasn't blocking even the most notorious "only exist to be N*zi" instances.

"racism is everywhere" is a BS excuse.

@Frankc1450 @lewriley @dave @Bam @thetitanborn Well, you're not reading very well, because you seem to have glossed right over the death threats part, and being sent racist images and videos of dead bodies and people killing women.

Based on the tone of your message, I'm choosing to disengage from further conversation with you. If that's your takeaway from this thread, I see this getting much worse before it gets better.

Be well! ✌🏿

@Frankc1450 @mekkaokereke @lewriley @dave @Bam @thetitanborn WTF sir, you not only missed the whole point, you missed the point he made in that sentence. That point about 4chan was that actual black people had the very real experience that, second to 4Chan, mastodon was the most racist (and racism tolerant community) social community.

He went above and beyond by even replying to you. Do better