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   LiteralGrill (literalgrill@sakurajima.moe)'s status on Saturday, 03-Aug-2024 11:12:02 JST LiteralGrill

   in reply to

   Well, I've seen a few solutions suggested so I figured I'd update this little post with thoughts on the best of them.

   A Hard Fork of Mastodon: The leadership behind Mastodon obviously do not consider the needs and safety of Black and other marginalized users as a priority. They refuse to allow even FREE labor toward making their product better. So let's put money into the hands of programmers to make something that does.

   Federation Blocks: Instead of block lists or allow lists, we try to go deeper. We can have groups that ONLY federate with known, safe instances with similar values and automatically refuse to federate with ALL others. These blocks can work together with other blocks to decide which groups are allowed in, including decisions to not federate with other blocks entirely.

   This stops freshly spun racist instances from being a pain, but limits reach on fedi in exchange for safety. It's also not the best for single person instances. Bluntly, this likely means defederating with .social and threads, some of the most toxic connections on all of fedi. (I'm unsure people are brave enough to do that yet but tbh we need to be.)

   No matter what happens, I want this place to be more diverse. If we truly value the voices of Black people on the fediverse, we have to show that by actively taking steps in doing so. I fear however, white folks comfortable on here and already enjoying their times don't want things to change and we're seeing in real time where their true values lie.

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     LiteralGrill (literalgrill@sakurajima.moe)'s status on Saturday, 03-Aug-2024 11:12:03 JST LiteralGrill

     Seeing the abuse certain Black users are experiencing yet again today, I once more am questioning if a federated social media can avoid these pitfalls simply due to the fact that it's federated again.

     I'm not sure what the solution is, but when every Black user who gives this place a chance and builds a following is actively chased away with abuse even worse than what is seen on Twitter or Bluesky, it's obvious we need one. It should be an absolute top priority of the dev team of Mastodon too, if not, maybe we all need to think about if something new needs to take a stronger foothold.

     AnthonyJK-Admin repeated this.