4 things white people can do to start making the fediverse less toxic for Black people (DRAFT!)
4 things white people can do to start making the fediverse less toxic for Black people (DRAFT!)
Draft! Work in progress! Feedback welcome!
Feedback welcome! Here's the TL;DR list
- Listen more to more Black people
- Post less – and think before you post
- Call in, call out, and/or report anti-Blackness when you see it
- Support Black people and Black-led instances and projects
Other suggestions?
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Post less – and think before you post
Does the fediverse have a problem with too much posting? 🤔
Too much posting by racist assholes, for sure.
I think the second point is quite important, but I do suggest to OP to clarify. My take is that if all you've got about a social issue is some gut reaction, and that you're neither concerned nor learned on the subject, you could do worse than to shut up and listen. (And reading titles off some feed is not learning.)
Does the fediverse have a problem with too much posting? 🤔
There is more to a community than volume.
Thanks. The article discusses this some, including
If you're white, you're almost certainly not an expert on anti-Blackness – on the fediverse or more generally. This means that your initial thoughts and questions on this subject are almost certainly going to be things many others have said before. So even if they're good questions or ideas, they're not particularly helpful and (since many Black people hear the same thing again and again) may well be annoying. And very often they're not particularly good questions or ideas – or you'll express them in a way that contributes to the fediverse's anti-Blackness.
And then has several examples. That said, improvement is needed -- the text of the section doesn't completely align with the headline -- so suggestions welcome!
The design of ActivityPub (or at least Mastodon) doesn't exactly help here either, given that you can't see most of the replies unless you click through to the original instance.
It's way too easy to leave a reply to a post without realizing that 30 other people have already said the exact same thing. So when I wan't to avoid being repetitive I have to remember to click through.
Yep. It probably accentuates Reply Guy-ism too. The underlying issues are social; technology can make things worse. This article focuses on the social aspects but I talked about some of AP's issues in the "And it's about the protocol too" section of Steps towards a Safer Fediverse
Oh wait there's a link! I thought this was a self post. Sorry for that 😅