The #Bluesky community is on strike, in protest of “free speech” moderation policies and refusal to prevent or remove #racism.

The inciting incident this time: users signing up with the n-word in their usernames. Using the word “cracker”, however, was a bannable offense.

Bluesky has not responded for over 36 hours as of writing. Devs are blocking protestors. Timelines are filled with variations of:

“No more normal posting until my Black friends and family are safe.”

#social #tech

It is beautiful to watch folks organize spontaneously around this. There are some really novel techniques being used that I have not seen before.

Shitposters and sex workers blurring their posts and withholding lewds, if only there was a safe platform to post them. Quote chains of people asking the devs to block them too in solidarity. Users building custom, public mute lists to block out fascists and protect marginalized communities.

The devs are liking nazi callout posts & posting on Twitter

But I would also like to take a second, before you enjoy too much schadenfreude, to point out that by and large PoC communities also are not safe on Mastodon.

A huge amount of the feedback being levied on Bluesky’s lasseiz faire moderation policies also apply to us here.

I have very little faith Bluesky will improve, but we still could.

@Haste isn't the issue that all the servers have seperate rules and shit, you'd need to get a common guideline set up.
@KitCatalina @Haste

There sort of is. Several of the biggest ActivityPub using servers have been defederated either voluntarily (like Gab and Truth Social) or involuntarily (like Pawoo). Maybe there needs to be a subset of the Fediverse that uses whitelists instead of blacklists with much stricter criteria, such as only federating with other servers sharing that whitelist at a minimum?
@o76923 @Haste @KitCatalina yeah, i like the idea of many more small opinionated spaces, one problem is the exclusivity tho and people with no network can't ever break in