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?
This is the cringest thing I’ve seen all month outside Hexbear.
I think your point about moderation tooling is worth a bullet point on its own. I think more tools for users to stay safe and for moderators to keep their instance safe would go a long way, and that there are people who would be willing and able to donate their time implementing them.
Also, the current draft is still pretty focused on Mastodon. I think it’s worth talking more about how the problems (and solutions) are different on different platforms, or if not then talk about working on the problem for Mastodon/microblogging as opposed to “the fediverse.”
Thanks for the feedback! The revised draft will talk about Lemmy as well. I’ve talked about the software aspects in a lot of other posts (Mastodon and today’s fediverse are unsafe by design and unsafe by default, for example, and there’s a section on it Don’t tell people “it’s easy”, and seven more things Kbin, Lemmy, and the fediverse can learn from Mastodon so don’t want to go into it here, but maybe I’ll add a link!
You’re just being asked to be thoughtful before opening your mouth. Is that so awful?
We’re at an inflection point where millions of people might be able to break free of the big social media companies. People are disgusted at the incumbents and are looking for someplace, anyplace to land.
Unfortunately, “Don’t be a dick” is in the critical path to success for the fediverse, We, the currently existing community, have to make it worth their while to jump to fedi, because if it’s a hassle, they’re just going to go somewhere else like bsky or Threads. Then we’ll all dragged along via network effects, riding the Wheel of Pain for another decade or so until that platform enshitifies and we maybe get another bite at the apple
You’re really illustrating the problem the OP is trying to fix quite nicely.
Instead of dropping a turd on our doorstep, why not have a policy of not commenting on stuff in places that you don’t really belong, like an normal person would in their regular life.
BTW, having a fedi-wide stream of popular posts was a mistake.
Apologies if I’m talking out of turn, I want to do my best to be a good ally but I recognize that I’ve got some serious blind spots!
With that caveat in mind, I would suggest that the problem making fedi unwelcoming is two-pronged:
1 ) It looks to me that fedi inherited the original sin of microblogging, which is that the system naturally rewards the spiciest hot takes that go with the local social currents.
2 ) Fedi’s culture was established by FOSS geeks rebelling against for-profit social media.
This has led to most instances becoming machines for manufacturing hot takes are going to have an unacceptably high mayonnaise content, highlighting the importance of your points 1 and 2! Nerds have to learn to slow down and think before shooting their mouth off, but it’s so tough to cut through the weird high school grievance politics.
(That mindset is a big part of what generated the whole problematic LessWrong/Techfash wave; your post fits in nicely with awful.system’s core mission!)
My impression is that Twitter avoided this because it was initially colonized by a more representative cross-section of society. This can be somewhat remediated via your points 3 and 4, but will face resistance – which kind of kills the fun of using fediverse for so many of the fedi-curious. This is a big problem when people can just go to bsky or whatever and find much of their old Twitter network already setting up shop and reconnecting with their communities.
Thankfully, some individual instances (like awful!) seem to get it, but for the most part the poison is already baked in, and it’s hard to unbake a cake and begin again. It will also be tough to get the existing core fedi community to understand that no level of “technical excellence” can fix what is fundamentally a social issue. Unlike baseball ghosts, actual people are under no obligation to come just because you built it!
Other than the kind of long, tough reckoning that society as a whole needs to face, it’s tough to see an answer. Do you think it would be possible to somehow begin and again have a “second genesis” of fedi, now that the wider world is more invested in finding alternatives to “big social?”
Thanks for working on this!
Thankfully, some individual instances (like awful!) seem to get it, but for the most part the poison is already baked in, and it’s hard to unbake a cake and begin again.
I think the biggest problem is either the lack of active moderation or, if present, moderators which are too lenient. Not that I blame anyone who thinks that removing the fifteenth racist asshat for the day is not the best use of their time, but the best communities are the ones that to make the effort to keep it clean.
This has been true since the days of Usenet. The good groups were completely moderated to the point where some person had to manually approve every single posted article. It worked (as long as the mods weren’t racist asshats themselves, which is a different problem), but in contrast, almost the entire alt. hierarchy was an unmoderated cesspit and to anyone who doesn’t know how that turned out long-term: good for you.
Luckily I think we are seeing a rise in moderated communities again. After Usenet and dedicated forums it somehow fell out of fashion (with 4chan and Reddit being the pinnacle of using but muh free speech! to give bigots a platform). Maybe it’s confirmation bias, but I do see many fedi instances who have stricter rules again and seem to enforce them in an attempt to create welcoming communities for everyone. I hope this trend continues.
Weak moderation on many instances – including large ones like mastodon.social – is a big problem, but I wouldn’t say it’s the biggest. Black people even on well-moderated instances get plenty of racist abuse – the moderation tools are horrible, and basic tools that peopl on Twitter have to protect themselves don’t even exist. Agreed though that many fedi instances do have stricter rules and make a real effort to enforce them … that’s a good thing!
Thanks for the perspectives. Agreed that it’s fundamentally a social issue.Fedi’s culture has evolved a lot over time; Before Mastodon: GNU social and the early fediverse has quotes and links from back in the day, including discusison of the 2016 wave of channers and GamerGaters joining GnuSocial. The 2016-7 Mastodon wave was very different, a lot of queer and trans people, but also had major problems with race – the article links to “Dogpiling, weaponized content warning discourse, and a fig leaf for mundane white supremacy” which has a bunch of discussion and links about that. So it got whiter. Flash forward and there’s the 2022/23 wave of people looking for a Twitter alternative … a lot of Black people looking at Mastodon were greeted by the N word so unsurprisingly didn’t stick around; many white people had more positive experiences, and talked about how nice everybody was, So it got whiter. Then there was mid-2024 wave of Redditors … what are the demographics of the people who came? The people who stayed? So I’m not sure it’s primarily a matter of miroblogging being a machine for manufacturing hot takes.
I certainly think there’s an opportunity for changing the dynamics. One possible direction is a split between regions that are actively working on it, and get better over time, and regions that are business as usual, with fairly weak connections between them. Time will tell!
I hear ya, fair points!
Oh, one thing I have seen minority folks ask for (and be ignored+condescended at about!) is better moderation tools. It’s tough to moderate big instances, particularly when under direct attack by malicious users.
Edit: oops, you’ve got it covered. Apologies for, in fact, being that guy!
The fediverses biggest problem is that people don’t use enough Linux. If that is not the most white middle class problem I don’t know what is.
Why do people think the fediverse is not filled with majority white people?
