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. ππ
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.π€·πΏββοΈ
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.π€·πΏββοΈ
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
Attached: 1 image to boost their mediocre understandings of the world to others. (If they weren't mediocre, they wouldn't have to pay would they? You'd do it for free for a great idea, right?) Therefore a platform which is seeking to maximise "Engagement" because axiom 1, it needs to pay for things, and, axiom 2, more money = more good will actually want to maximise rage and boost unpopular points of view. And bots are a great way to do this. We can see that BlueSky is set up to speedrun Twitter 5/T
@daphlawless @iragsdale @BlackAzizAnansi @Are0h
They haven't implemented Blocking *yet*. That alone was a questionable decision, but it's different from "We don't believe blocking is a needed feature." Blocking will ship next week.
They're also implementing composable moderation.
Their model is that your social media data is stored in a Merkle Tree, like a Git repo. Your id is a DID, a type of GUID. You can take your repo to any server, and likes, follows, etc don't change due to DIDs.
@daphlawless @iragsdale @BlackAzizAnansi @Are0h
They don't moderate the protocol at all, just like Linus can't stop nazis from using Git, and Gagron can't stop nazis from setting up a Mastodon instance.
But an instance is moderated, just like GitHub is moderated, and Mastodon.social is moderated. They build on this by saying that users and servers can plug in multiple "moderation providers."
Will this moderation idea work in practice? TBD. But it's not "no blocking, no moderation, only mute"
> But it's not "no blocking, no moderation, only mute"
Sounds to me like you are referring to an evolutionary process. The community has come to understand realities that are out there that wasn't in the scope at first glance. Can't see a point of critic in that. When friendica started it only had a positive list of servers to connect exclusively, later came the blocking function out of need.
That is normal in a process I guess.
mekka okereke 
Ian Ragsdale
Phlawless
soaproot
jeSuisatire neindochohh αβΜ€αα·