Conversation

at the risk of sounding flippant, I’m noticing a pattern from media reports on fedi.

‘Mastodon is too difficult to understand, users bounce off and leave for greener pastures’

fedi continues to grow

‘Mastodon is racist, is chasing away users’

fedi continues to grow, including many people of color

‘Um, well, fedi is actually sexist, there are no women there’

fedi continues to grow, including many women (seems like most of my feed is women)

‘reporter becoming increasingly desperate No actually actually, fedi is full of CSAM, and when we surveyed, we found that most of the posts were abuse images’

I’m not saying none of these things are issues. This network does have a problem with being confusing for new people, and at times racist, and at times sexist. there are a lot of servers on the underbelly that are dealing in terrible things and need to be walled off.

That’s not why they are making the reports though. they feel threatened that there’s growing interest in a platform without ads that’s outside of capitalist control, and they are trying every single angle to sow division and stop people from looking into it. That’s why the reports never dive into an honest comparison to other platforms (CSAM on Twitter was a huge problem for years and years. I’ve read it’s gotten better but I’m not going to try to verify that. and I won’t even get into the racism and sexism on Twitter.)

I’ve definitely been disturbed that I needed to set up a big blocklist to keep these people out of my server, there’s an important conversation to be had about what more we can do, and how to make this network safer. That conversation is not going to come from the Washington Post though, I’m sure of that.