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
mekka okereke 
Ian Ragsdale
fulanigirl has moved