All of the posts on Mastodon about how the Blue Sky team was silly for releasing a social media network in 2023 without blocking and moderation, even in private beta, and that the Blue Sky team should have known what would happen...
...are being written on Mastodon: a social media platform that in 2023, still doesn't take into account that Black users face a disproportionate amount of very specific types of abuse, and is missing key features that would make the Black population safer. 🙂🙃
It really is the social media equivalent of white folks telling Black folks that Boston is less racist than the South, and completely ignoring any Black folk that live in Boston or anywhere else in the US trying to talk about what their real, lived, experiences have been.
Many Mastodon users are just completely convinced of the superiority of their moderation philosophy, and they are as happy to ignore the few Black Fedi users in 2023 as they were in 2017.
I'm not interested in having Fedi 'splained to me. I'm just saying why more Black folk are on BlueSky:
1. It should be almost impossible for a new, non-technical user to onboard onto the Fediverse and accidentally join a server where they will receive racist death threats.
2. It should not be possible for racists to reply to a Black user's post with hateful gore images, without other users on the server knowing it.
3. It should be easy for a new admin to default into a safe, general denylist.
This isn't an exhaustive list, but these 3 are fairly straightforward ones. And they're not new. You can seriously find Black users asking for these going back to 2017.
Even trying to discuss these often results in:
* You just don't know how the Fediverse works!
* Shared deny lists can be abused, so let's never have them!
* You just love Twitter! You want quote tweets! You want Elon to hurt you again!
So Black Fediverse users tend to self-select into one of a few buckets:
1) Kinda Stubborn (AKA, this isn't my 1st racism): Willing to stay until things improve. People like me, @BlackAzizAnansi etc.
2) Super Stubborn (AKA, I will change you!): Willing to stay and fight the tide of the whole Fediverse for as long as it takes to fix things. @Are0h etc.
3) Normal People (AKA, life is too short): They just leave the Fediverse. This is most Black folk.
The "3s" are going from Twitter to BlueSky.🤷🏿♂️
If you take one thing from my little thread here it's this: Black people don't leave the fediverse because of openly racist people.
Just like Black people don't leave Boston or San Francisco because of the openly racist people. There are openly racist people everywhere.🤷🏿♂️
Black people leave the fediverse, Boston, and San Francisco, because of the behavior of the supposed "non-racist" people. The combination of extreme racism, and denial of its existence, is too much.
@iragsdale @BlackAzizAnansi @Are0h
BlueSky is building in 1st class composable moderation providers. FediBlock faced years of resistance.
BlueSky you can see horrible replies. Mastodon, I still run into people that have genuinely never seen the type of abuse that some Black folk endure on the same server that they've been on for years.
BlueSky is starting with just one instance, with curated members, so that you *can't* choose an unprotected server by mistake. Mastodon doesn't have that. Etc
@mammoth @mekkaokereke @bart @HannibalElector I’ve been toying with a personal instance of it, and I have to say I am impressed. The original MK is brutal to even try to stand up, as an English speaker. CK in my test env was easy enough to set up and #JustWorks.
I just had a weird backend issue,no SSH on my phone, but pretty sure I can just kill and restart. Has been pretty stable. No idea at scale but I like CK
Only been here since Nov '22 but I see it too, and it boils my blood. Here's another one:
* Let me passive-aggressively whitesplain how to use the platform while I condescendingly imply there isn't a problem actually and you're just overreacting
@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] 1) Don't ask Black users to CW discussions of their own racism. 2) Don't be on a server where mods mistreat Black folk. 3) Support the mods on your own server, financially and otherwise. 4) Don't engage with sea lions that say "Mistreatment? Here? prove it!" There have been enough threads shared on Black folk receiving racism. Individually convincing each one is exhausting, and expecting that is a tactic of bad faith actors.
@bwebster @mekkaokereke thanks! That didn't show in my client.
I'm curious about the solutions for these problems that Mastodon could implement and that bluesky is currently implementing.
@mekkaokereke his non-exhaustive list of wishes. It's all very reasonable, and I hope bluesky achieves them.
I'm not interested in having Fedi 'splained to me. I'm just saying why more Black folk are on BlueSky: 1. It should be almost impossible for a new, non-technical user to onboard onto the Fediverse and accidentally join a server where they will receive racist death threats. 2. It should not be possible for racists to reply to a Black user's post with hateful gore images, without other users on the server knowing it. 3. It should be easy for a new admin to default into a safe, general denylist.
@mekkaokereke
Can you explain, please:
1. What is "moderation philosophy"?
2. Are you indicating that black users cannot express themselves on Mastodon as they would like to do?
😘🙏
It seems "moderation philosophy" means the server's criteria used to block or mark certain content, correct?
Also, when following the conversation I sometimes don't know who is meant: only black people or everybody?
@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] 1) Don't ask Black users to CW discussions of their own racism. 2) Don't be on a server where mods mistreat Black folk. 3) Support the mods on your own server, financially and otherwise. 4) Don't engage with sea lions that say "Mistreatment? Here? prove it!" There have been enough threads shared on Black folk receiving racism. Individually convincing each one is exhausting, and expecting that is a tactic of bad faith actors.
@Raven47 @mekkaokereke Mastodon has its own history with anti-black racism:
Philosophy: when Black folk say "Can you add this feature that would greatly reduce racism?" We're told "No! That's how Fedi is supposed to work! Just move!" And then moving loses all your posts.🤡
People get more upset about Black people saying Black joy things to each other without a CW, than they do about Black people receiving abuse because they joined the wrong server.
The resistance to safe default deny lists is a trade-off between Black user safety, and fear of being excluded.
@oliphant and @Are0h are better at maintaining a safe deny list than almost any admin on Fedi will ever be. It should be possible for any admin to just delegate responsibility to them at setup time. The decision not to let people delegate and compose ongoing moderation tasks like deny lists, is a philosophical choice that balances user safety (primarily affecting Black folk) with notions of "openness."
(*Even better, it should be possible for admins to pay them for this, but hey.)
@mcv @[email protected] @oliphant @Raven47 @mekkaokereke A while back, I saw where someone was working on something like a "Federated" blocklist aggregator - IIRC, the concept was, it tracks which servers were blocked by which other servers, and presented the info as a sorta "reverse social graph", so you can see e.g., who's blocked by everybody, who's blocked by just two other servers, etc.
Seemed like a promising concept! Wish I could find it now...
@mekkaokereke @Raven47 @oliphant @Are0h Yeah this basically echoes what I’ve been doing with the blocklists I gave Ollie. FediNuke for a baseline, Tier-0 for a starting point with wiggle room, and the full envs list for something more comprehensive. I didn’t even realize this is what I was trying to accomplish until you put it into words for me, in this thread and elsewhere: it should be possible to “stack” these! A sub-network of instances can agree on a minimal list of bad actors, each instance can draw different lines in the sand and hold those lines more comprehensively, and individual users can supplement those with their own boundaries while finding lists that match with them.
One thing I’ll add: blocklists vary when it comes to which boundaries they set, and how well they maintain those boundaries. Understanding the latter is easy but defining the former is probably going to get really messy if our real-time blocklist subscription projects take off.
Edited to link to the article where I describe them.
@Seirdy @mekkaokereke @Raven47 @oliphant @Are0h
A realtime subscription also has a big advantage over copypasting (which is effectively append-only) in that is makes it possible to federate the removal of servers from a blocklist in the event of a mistake or a temporary problem (after it gets fixed).
@mekkaokereke Could you please reference the issues for the software you are talking about? Mastodon is just one, but not the only one.
What is a "safe default deny list"? Who would be tasked to maintain such a list? There exists a list: https://meta.chaos.social/federation.
@mekkaokereke Having grown up in St. Augustine Florida back when reading about history was still legal in that state, I've got to say kudos for the Boston comparison in particular: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_desegregation_busing_crisis#Violence
The way some of us white folks aggressively forget our histories says a lot about how we'll act when our comfort or self-image are threatened. And that's even before getting to the actual material change we all need!
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