mekka okereke :verified:
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. 🙂🙃
Paul Cantrell
@mekkaokereke Yeah. One of the most difficult lessons in grow-up school is that being surprised does not necessarily indicate that others are incorrect.
mekka okereke :verified:
It really is the social media equipment 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.
mekka okereke :verified:
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.
mekka okereke :verified:
So Black Fediverse users tend to self-select into one of a few buckets:
1) Kinda Stubborn (AKA, this isn't my 1st racism): Willing to stay until things improve. People like me, @BlackAzizAnansi etc.
2) Super Stubborn (AKA, I will change you!): Willing to stay and fight the tide of the whole Fediverse for as long as it takes to fix things. @Are0h etc.
3) Normal People (AKA, life is too short): They just leave the Fediverse. This is most Black folk.
The "3s" are going from Twitter to BlueSky.🤷🏿♂️
mekka okereke :verified:
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!
mekka okereke :verified:
@msbellows @BlackAzizAnansi @Are0h
There's better in theory, and there's better in lived reality.
1 in 5 Black US citizens was a daily active Twitter user. Most of them used Twitter for years, and never received a reply containing images of burned Black bodies with comments like "I wish we could lynch N-words again!" Some of the Black folk heading from Twitter did see those replies, tried to report them, were ignored, and left Mastodon. Those users tried BlueSky and they haven't been abused.
M.S. Bellows, Jr.
@mekkaokereke @BlackAzizAnansi @Are0h But is Blue Sky any better? I mean, a lot of folks are sticking with Twitter, which sure as hell isn't better moderation-wise than Mastodon.
mekka okereke :verified:
If you take one thing from my little thread here it's this: Black people don't leave the fediverse because of openly racist people.
Just like Black people don't leave Boston or San Francisco because of the openly racist people. There are openly racist people everywhere.🤷🏿♂️
Black people leave the fediverse, Boston, and San Francisco, because of the behavior of the supposed "non-racist" people. The combination of extreme racism, and denial of its existence, is too much.
mekka okereke :verified:
Yes, way too much power for any one person.
Luckily, people have put a lot of thought into how to do this as a co-operative endeavor, rather than a monarchy.
https://writer.oliphant.social/oliphant/the-oliphant-social-blocklist
Some of the best moderated places on the Fediverse already do this.
Evan Prodromou
@joelving @mekkaokereke yes, would need transparency and oversight.
Also, choosing among multiple denylists would be great.
Peter Toft Jølving
That's an awful lot of power to put in the hands of the author of that denylist, isn't it?
Evan Prodromou
@mekkaokereke I agree with this plan.
I'd extend #3 to say that admins should have to opt out of denylists; they should be turned on and auto-updated by default.
Victoria De Capua
@mekkaokereke @evan @joelving I'd like to see moderation being more coordinated like this. My experience moderating is on a very large subreddit, and action tends to be very visible (consultation with the team for more complex issues) so I'm unfamiliar with what structures people are using for their instances. It feels really wild west to me in some ways.
GNU Too
mcv
@Syphilia @Are0h @BlackAzizAnansi @mekkaokereke When I was young, the Dutch were certain that we were the most tolerant nation in the world. We weren't racist! We dealt with that at the end of WW2. Racist parties would never get more than one seat in our parliament. Also, we were a merchant nation, and racism was bad for business, so we'd always been this tolerant (let's not mention the slave trade, okay?).
Then, about 20 years ago, one racist party after another kept popping up. Suddenly racists were coming out of the woodwork everywhere. Every time someone pointed out something was racist, racists would quickly deny it and demonstrate their racism.
Maybe we were just good at pretending we weren't racist. Or at least good at fooling ourselves.
Syphilia Morgenstierne
@mekkaokereke Sounds like Norway (where I live). The combination of extreme racism and denial of its existence. Fills me with unlimited sadness. Don't know what can be done. Very few black people, faces turned away, and rightly so because if they're not directly abused they're thoroughly whitesplained. Makes me think there is no hope for this world. @BlackAzizAnansi @Are0h
Jeramee
@radio @mekkaokereke @indyradio
Blob.cat? Is that the bird app?
:blobcathug:
radio
@mekkaokereke why I am not on blob.cat
it had turned into a playground for Nazi pigs. take note that I am here and erased everything I had as "@indyradio"
Jeramee
@Jain @indyradio @mekkaokereke @radio
I don't believe you.
From my experience, Radio has focused more on news, and most political opinions have been coupled with historic or current events analysis.
Please stop publicly defaming people.
:blobcathug:
:blobcathug:
radio
@Jeramee @Jain @indyradio @mekkaokereke I guess you're responding to someone I blocked.
It was enough of a hindrance while I made the mistake of having an account on an experimental server. 🙄
:blobcathug:
Jeramee
@Jain @indyradio @mekkaokereke @radio
I don't know what you're talking about. I never changed servers. Stop harrassing people.
mekka okereke :verified:
Yes, unlisted replies.
A lot of the targeted abuse that I received while on Mastodon.cloud, was unlisted replies to posts.
No one else saw, and mods did nothing with reports.
When I moved to Hachyderm, it dropped to practically zero. When it does happen on Hachyderm, mods are all over it. ♥️👍🏿
Emelia 👸🏻
@mekkaokereke I've been pretty vocal on Mastodon's discord about figuring out improvements to moderation tooling (I did a heap of work in 2018 on trying to improve them)
I know I don't know the experience of black users, and I mostly draw on my experiences of being trans (different minority, different harms, but maybe some overlap, I'm not sure), but I do dearly wish to have world class moderation tools that just *work* on the fediverse.
On point 2 below, the replies, is that due to unlisted?
mekka okereke :verified:
No, but people smarter than me do!
The 3 things listed here would be a good start, and would have prevented the take-off of BlueSky.
https://hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/110273797004251326
@erincandescent has a good writeup on how we might handle reply abuse.
@oliphant and @Are0h invented "composable moderation' and the concept of "delegated moderation providers" years ago, they just didn't call it that.
Lots of folks have talked about safer onboarding for years.
Erica "digifox" Kovac 🌐⚛️⚡
@mekkaokereke do you have a link to a writeup about fedi/Mastodon features that would make Black users safer?
mekka okereke :verified:
@digifox @erincandescent @oliphant @Are0h
There's real safety through *moderation* (how do we handle bad actors?). And imagined safety through *curation.* (Who gets to join?).
To date, BlueSky is safety through curation, and that's breaking spectacularly. One single Nazi got in a few days ago, and wreaked havoc. And with invites, someone invited journalists. Journalists invited transphobes. And now we have trans folk and transphobes on a site with no block function yet. It's a whole mess.
mekka okereke :verified:
@digifox @erincandescent @oliphant @Are0h
Instead of saying "BlueSky is better!" Or "Mastodon is better!" we should recognize that for Black users, Mastodon and BlueSky both fail spectacularly in different ways that can be fixed by making slightly different trade-offs.
"😮Why would you even join a site with no blocks yet?" Is a very reasonable question. The answer from many Black users would be "Because it was still way less racist and less dangerous than being on Mastodon?"
mekka okereke :verified:
Oh I'm not leaving Mastodon. I'm patient (stubborn?).
I've seen the work that Oliphant, AreOh, Quintessence, have put into this place. Mastodon has been battle tested under the most extreme racism, transphobia, misogyny, and anti-Semitism. It has burn-in.
And I've seen a positive shift recently in how Eugen and the Mastodon devs think about these topics. I'm not proposing anything new. These ideas are years old. They're just being evaluated with a new lense.
Administrator
@mekkaokereke Mekka, I really hope you find what you're looking for on BlueSky.
And if you ever do come back to Mastodon, I hope that some of the moderation tools you've requested will finally be part of the main codebase.
Brandon Webster
@heathborders @mekkaokereke it’s right in his pinned posts
https://hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/109454206758285621
Heath Borders
@mekkaokereke I'm sure you've mentioned this before, but Mastodon search is terrible, so could you please say again what features Mastodon is missing that would help alleviate abuse Black people face here?
mekka okereke :verified:
Philosophy: when Black folk say "Can you add this feature that would greatly reduce racism?" We're told "No! That's how Fedi is supposed to work! Just move!" And then moving loses all your posts.🤡
People get more upset about Black people saying Black joy things to each other without a CW, than they do about Black people receiving abuse because they joined the wrong server.
The resistance to safe default deny lists is a trade-off between Black user safety, and fear of being excluded.
Earthling
@mekkaokereke
Can you explain, please:
1. What is "moderation philosophy"?
2. Are you indicating that black users cannot express themselves on Mastodon as they would like to do?
😘🙏
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