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
The blessing of the Fediverse is its open source decentralization; it doesn't allow one billionaire or one corporation to move in, buy everything out, and impose his own personal right-wing or pro-corporate biases and myopia on everyone else.
@mekkaokereke @msbellows @BlackAzizAnansi @Are0h
The biggest curse of the Fediverse, OTOH, is its....decentralization, because it puts the onus of controlling content on individual instances and moderators, and it's all too easy for bigots and racists to slip through the cracks and do their terrorism if instance admins don't do proper diligence or simply don't care.
@mekkaokereke @msbellows @BlackAzizAnansi @Are0h
The beauty of centralized systems is that there are fewer bosses and hurdles to go through, and one leader/admin/mod from above can press the switches, or command someone below them to do so, to mitigate or eliminate potential issues.
Fighting one instance allowing for racist harassment is one thing; having to play Whack-A-Nazi because they can work through multiple instances if admins allow for it, is something else altogether.
@Are0h @mekkaokereke @msbellows
Ummmm....this is about Mastodon instances and Black tooters having to deal with racist harassment here, not about the obvious influx of bigotry over at Twitter since MusKKKrat took over. I am well aware of Twitter bigotry and MusKKKrat's exploitation of it f as a long-time user of Twitter myself; it was one of the main reasons I gravitated to Masto to begin with.
@Are0h @mekkaokereke @msbellows
Are you saying that Twitter was a decentralized service? Even before Musk took over, it was very much centralized, with a professional staff of moderators, arbitrators, and auditors to regulate the flow of content.
And that was before MusKKKrat took over and fired everyone and imposed his own autocratic AltRight regime for private profit.
mekka okereke 
M.S. Bellows, Jr.
AnthonyJK-Admin
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Pal