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!
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/15011909
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?
Posting less is how you kill the whole idea of the fediverse
Im also wondering how the fediverse is toxic for black people.
From the article
Dr. Johnathan Flowers' The Whiteness of Mastodon, Ra’il I'Nasah Kiam and Marcia X's Blackness in the Fediverse, and the links in Dogpiling, weaponized content warning discourse, and a fig leaf for mundane white supremacy have some of the history.
Or — or — you could post less but better.
Since this is just a draft, you should change #2 to just "think before you post".
It can make sense in certain circumstances, like in BLM rallies telling white people that it wasn't our stage to speak makes sense, but telling people of a certain skin colour to "post less" in general is racist as fuck.
Are black people all going to have labels so we know who to support and listen to? I think this is pretty weird tbh.
I honestly don't get it, to me I just see user IDs I haven't the slightest clue what race someone is or isn't on here. I vote solely based on whether they make a good point or a bad point.
Guys! I created a system of guidelines where black people and white people follow two different sets of rules! I'm helping!
Edit: Remember folx before you post: when was the last time you 🫵 listened to To Pimp a Butterfly?
Combat racism by making literally everything all about race!
1, 3, and 4 are all solid suggestions. But 'post less'? The Fediverse is sparse enough as it is.
Eugh Americans, think the whole world should cater to them.
Some sure. But you run into that in other countries too. This is coming from a well-traveled American, so take it however you like. Just saying we don't exclusively nor universally deserve that title.
The Tripolar World is real. If your country isn't America, Russia, or China, it exists as a proxy state of one of the aforementioned
India?
Stop asking Black people for evidence of the anti-Blackness. Believe them: it's real. If you want to see specific examples, do the work yourself to find them rather than asking Black people to do it for you.
IMO examples are exactly what should be provided on this page. The page would be much better if it were just 3-4 headings that looked like
Heading
Example quote 1
Improvement suggestion
Example quote 2
Improvement suggestion
Description and context
Also, why limit it to "blackness". What in the world is "blackness"? Sounds like black royalty "Your Blackness, how may I be of help today?".
Anyway, I'm not sure what prompted this, which is exactly why I ask for examples. I quit reddit (never was on twitter) during the exodus and honestly, the biggest change I'd like is for USAmericans to get their own instance where they can talk about their problems. Black US Americans deal with very different things than Africans and Europeans with African descent.
do the work
This is a phrase I only ever hear from people suffering heavily from White Saviorism.
The very first sentence in in quote at the beginning of the article describes what prompted this
"In recent days, folks such as @ErickaSimone@mastodon.social, @KimCrayton1@dair-community.social, @timnitGebru@dair-community.social ... and many, MANY more have been speaking out about how toxic fedi culture is for Black folks and how the tools we have access to just aren't enough."
If you want examples, there are links in the first paragraph of the article (after the quote), and section #1 describes how to find more. The first paragraph also defines anti-Blackness:
beliefs, attitudes, actions, practices, and behaviors of individuals, institutions, software, and systems that devalue, minimize, and marginalize the full participation of Black people
I spent a few minutes researching this, and I still have no idea what the problem is. Or any motivation to keep researching.
Honestly, I might be part of the problem. I'm a white guy, and there are basically no black people in my life. I don't see any in the streets, at work, at home or here. Especially here, I have no idea who anyone is.
Basically, I have no reason to get involved. However, I don't want to be part of the problem. So if you spoonfeed me information I can use to make life better for "the blackness" (I'm very confused about the terminology), I will happily read it and try to remember it.
So don't just tell me the solution, none of the TLDR makes any sense to me. Spend a few words on the problem.
As far as I can tell, there's basically two kinds of people:
1 - People who just don't care about other people in the Fediverse. They will not read any of this, there's nothing you can write here that will change anything for them.
2 - People who are trying to be nice, but don't always succeed. They will listen to advice, but nothing will change by telling them to be nice, be less racist, or to listen to people even if they are black. That's what they are already trying to do.
🙄
"Post less" isn't going to help a platform that's still in early days that needs more active posters.
Best I can think of with a 30 second investment of time and thought is:
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when you post about your perspective/experience, post knowing it is only your perspective. You speak for no one else.
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when other people post with perspectives that differ from yours, default to believing them
(I also feel like these two cover not just blackness, but women and LGBT+ and even white men who don't have the same perspectives as the majority on this white-and-western platform)
Edit: In response to the four guidelines:
Listen more to more Black people
Sounds good but I don't see how this works in practice here. Anyone claiming to be black on an anonymous platform is 50/50 or more likely to be not black. Reddit had an entire "as a black man" sub making fun of people posing as black and the same problem will exist here.
Post less – and think before you post
See above, not what fediverse needs.
Call in, call out, and/or report anti-Blackness when you see it
For sure.
Support Black people and Black-led instances and projects
I have literally never seen an instance identified as black-led, so not sure who to be supporting. It also seems like it would have a similar problem to a topic that starts getting a bit niche. Like, a movie community will do fine, get more niche to a horror movie community and momentum dies out quickly. Horror aficionados are best off posting to the movie community and non-horror people can deal with the occasional post that doesn't inspire them.
Post something to the movie community about black actors and directors in the horror film industry, or about black characters, or about a horror story that is built on (or appropriated from) a black story, hell yeah, I'm in. Don't spin it off to a different community or instance because most will never see it.
Thanks, in the revised version I'll clarify the "Post less". And, I also have suggestions about amplifying Black voices similar to your last paragraph.
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LMAO this is a joke right?
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The Fediverse does have a massive white slant and the default experience isn't very embracing of different cultures.
There's a bunch of people who would like to see things improved and as of yet, there's not much consensus. The only real idea I've seen floated thus far is blocklist subscriptions.
A massive part of the problem as I see it is, and don't get me wrong, this is a symptom, not a root cause, people are inclined to use the wrong tools. Mastodon is a microblog and yet people are determined to use it for groups and nuanced conversation where their instance only supports 400 characters.
Also WriteFreely is the only active blog service in the Fediverse and needs some love.
We need to encourage people to move to tools that better fit their needs and desires and honestly part of the problem with that is that people feel they'll lose their interactions/audience and that is about Mastodon being shit, because while they can focus on making things more seamless with Lemmy and soon to be Discourse, NodeBB, etc. They're seemingly not willing to.
In regards to Lemmy specifically. Lemmy has a problem. You can see that by the fact this has been voted down to oblivion. When people treat ALL like a personal subscription feed and vote down things they're not interested in or dislike, it creates a monoculture. And no, I'm not saying don't downvote things, but there's a difference between voting down something because it's not great in a community and because you're trying to curate ALL. Maybe a solution is to add local/subscribed only voting options for communities. Lemmy needs to learn to embrace things that aren't for you and sometimes, in fact most times, that's as simple as saying, "that's not for me, I'll ignore it."
there’s a difference between voting down something because it’s not great in a community and because you’re trying to curate ALL
This right here 👆 ALL has its purposes, and none of those are "serving your individual perfect home feed". It becomes a tyranny of the norm. It is/was the biggest problem with Reddit, I'm surprised despite my own instincts to see that it has migrated here.
Yep. Agreed both about encouraging people to move to tools that better fit their needs -- and also agreed that it's a symptom, not a cause. Part of the challenge is that migrating from Mastodon to another platform (or for that matter even from one Mastodon instance to another) you lose your posting history, and there isn't any good way to move an entire instance yet. And yes, Lemmy has a problem.
Also, while we're here. Let's call out instances that don't update their Lemmy version because they want to make a point, even though doing so would bring quality of life improvements to black community members. Looking at you Beehaw and even Lemmy World.
Also Lemmy.ml for turning into fuck ups. Being the second largest instance, especially one that was less mainstream in their beliefs, they just had to keep doing them. They were never going to be popular, but different and well run was enough. Then they started making questionable decisions and not explaining them. Which, being that they're so well read, know never ends well. They had more time on their hands and started being overly involved in the instance and that hurts their community members in ways in which they're too up their arse to take stock of. Step away from the admin panel, let your moderators moderate.
Us not upgrading has nothing to do with making a point.
We're aiming to run a stable instance, which can come at the cost of delayed updates.
We didn't update to 0.19.4, and a few weeks later 0.19.5 was released with a number of critical bugfixes.
0.19.6 will have several more fixes for issues introduced in 0.19.4+, such as a fix for remote moderators updating local communities, allowing admins to filter modlog entries by moderator, as well as some performance issues reported by other instances.
We usually wait for other instances to run the latest version for some time to allow bug reports to surface before we update ourselves.
It makes sense that the bias in English speaking societies would be reflected on English speaking platforms. The posts here reflect the white western perspective. I would love to see more diversity as it does seem culturally “flat” here.
I don't really understand why this is getting so massively downvoted.
Seems perfectly reasonable to me as a white person. Yes, point two could be more nuanced, but otherwise aren't all these downvotes kind of illustrating the point the OP is making here?
Point 2 is exactly why it is being down-voted. A post about how the Fediverse is toxic to one race/skin colour shouldn't be telling people of a different race/skin colour to "post less".
Discrimination based on race isn't welcome, no matter who it's against.
Point 2 is better explained in the article. I don't take this as discrimination, more that while I will always aim to empathise and understand as much as I can about the black experience and be an ally, it's something I will never have direct experience of, so maybe there are some conversations that I don't need to muscle in on.
Indeed. Funny how that works! Glad you thought it was reasonable, and agreed that point 2 needs work.
Yeah haha, I think point 2 is well explained in the article, maybe it's too generalised here.
Still good general advice for posting in my opinion, better to think in general.
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Why would I "Post less," and expect that to help black people?! What?!
Something is off with this person.
I can understand wanting to make the world a better place, but I think the execution here is in poor taste.
Makes sense to me, nothing to add! I hope the fediverse gets better for marginalized people...
Unfortunately Lemmy being a reddit-like platform, there's likely gonna be a bunch of reddit-like people in these comments saying reddit-like things that go against one or all of these guidelines.
Thanks, glad you like it! And yeah, there have indeed been some reddit-like things said in this thread. Oh well, comes with the territory. The lemmy.blahaj.zone thread is somewhat better so far (famous last words).
My guess is that the fediverse will split into regions that decide to address anti-Blackness (and everything else) and others that ... don't. Similarly, some platforms will focus on improving safety and others ... won't. Lemmy's likely to be in the "won't" category but time will tell!