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.
@msbellows @BlackAzizAnansi @Are0h
There's better in theory, and there's better in lived reality.
1 in 5 Black US citizens was a daily active Twitter user. Most of them used Twitter for years, and never received a reply containing images of burned Black bodies with comments like "I wish we could lynch N-words again!" Some of the Black folk heading from Twitter did see those replies, tried to report them, were ignored, and left Mastodon. Those users tried BlueSky and they haven't been abused.
@mekkaokereke @msbellows @BlackAzizAnansi @Are0h
I was one of those who have had to face these KKK cruds.
Thankfully, I'm the admin and owner of my instance, hosted through my own private domain, and a kind follower was able to guide me to using blocklists of domains where many of the racists were tooting from. Implemented the list; the racists disappeared. Any new ones get blocked/blacklisted on sight.
It's all about the admin of the instance & his/her commitment to erasing racist content.
@mekkaokereke @msbellows @BlackAzizAnansi @Are0h
I'd say that the main issue with Mastodon right now is that admins and mods of instances are so busy puffing up the Fediverse as the Great Mecca against the MusKKKyBird that they tend to overlook or wave off the fact that not everyone is as tech savvy as they; and that any instance is only as good as its admin and mods are in doing due diligence to combat racist/homophobic/transphobic/antisemitic/aggressively harassing speech.
@AnthonyJK @msbellows @BlackAzizAnansi @Are0h
Wouldn't your life have been better if you could have just selected a moderation provider at setup time?
Imagine if one of the default providers was called "FediBlock," and it's type was "Server level denyList" and you could see which other instances opted-in to using this (most of them), and it had a short description, and an option to keep it updated.
We could have this. Yes there are trade-offs with everything.
@mekkaokereke @msbellows @BlackAzizAnansi @Are0h
But, of course.
My first outreach through Masto was through Mastodon.social, like most others (although I also had an account through Switter until it got shut down because the domain owner wouldn't defend sex workers' right to defend themselves). It was alright, but I ultimately went to self-hosting through my own domain and Masto.host because I wanted the freedom of full ownership and control. Best $19/month investment I ever did.
mekka okereke 
M.S. Bellows, Jr.
AnthonyJK-Admin