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!

@mekkaokereke quote posts coming pronto in @mammoth
@bart @mekkaokereke @mammoth Will you consider supporting the “quote" property on status (before converting card / links) which some Mastodon forks (e.g. Fedibird) provide?
@bart @mekkaokereke @mammoth “quote" property follows the same format as "reblog” and includes the full status. Using this property first will encourage more Mastodon-compatible backends to adopt the feature.
@mark @mekkaokereke @mammoth thanks for flagging this! @jtomchak @rileyhBat
@bart @mekkaokereke @mammoth @jtomchak @rileyhBat No problem! I'm currently working on a custom Mastodon-compatible backend designed for single-user instances and have been testing with both Mammoth and Ivory. Here's how quote posts appear on the web & the relevant property in the JSON that triggers it.
@mark @bart @mekkaokereke @mammoth @rileyhBat that’s looking really good. Can you explain or point me to some more details on the ‘quote’ property? Is that just starting with “From:” or “Quote:” before the original status url?
@jtomchak @bart @mekkaokereke @mammoth @rileyhBat Quote is essentially a reblog status that also includes content. Mastodon forks & other fediverse backends include it on the statuses API.
@mark @jtomchak @bart @mekkaokereke @mammoth @rileyhBat oh oh oh. I’m with ya. I was like, wait a minute. How’d you get content into a reblog status through the Mastodon API
@jtomchak @bart @mekkaokereke @mammoth @rileyhBat I think that if popular 3rd party clients add support for the property it can potentially encourage vanilla Mastodon to adopt the feature.