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1. Embed this notice
   carl marks (tillshadeisgone@blackqueer.life)'s status on Thursday, 17-Oct-2024 22:15:29 JST carl marks

   Regular reminder that getting up in arms about someone else's boundaries is a pretty good sign that someone is engaging in abusive behavior.

   And yes, being upset about allowlist only, FediBlock, or TBS are all examples of this.

   Never have I seen a group of people more determined to continue harassment after being muted/blocked/banned than those who lost their minds when we started openly collectivizing our boundaries to keep each other safe. As has always been the case, reactionary behavior means we're doing something right.

   • Embed this notice
     Fifi Lamoura (fifilamoura@eldritch.cafe)'s status on Thursday, 17-Oct-2024 22:36:18 JST Fifi Lamoura

     in reply to

     @tillshadeisgone 💯 It's shocking how many grown ass people still don't understand consent. There's an underlying belief that other people exist only for their use and entertainment, it's treating Othered people as exploitable objects and is dehumanizing and exploitative. Nothing outrages an abuser more than when the person being victimized creates a safe space beyond the reach of their abuse.

   • Embed this notice
     Stefan Bohacek (stefan@stefanbohacek.online)'s status on Thursday, 17-Oct-2024 22:36:33 JST Stefan Bohacek

     in reply to

     @tillshadeisgone This also extends to the overall topic of consent on here, if you've witnessed some of the conversations around opt-in vs opt-out fediverse features and third party services.

     Seems like it should be easy to just leave people alone, especially when they ask for it. Hm.

   • Embed this notice
     carl marks (tillshadeisgone@blackqueer.life)'s status on Friday, 18-Oct-2024 03:46:26 JST carl marks

     in reply to

     • -

     @hyphen here's the thing, and I'm going to put it very simply because my reasoning is very straightforward.

     Until someone has an alternative tool that protects Black fedizens just as well or better than fediblock, TBS, allowlist, etc I don't care how they feel about them.

     Instance level blocks and curated blocklists are a non negotiable for us to exist on this network and they still aren't enough. BQL would not have lasted a week without them and yet despite these tools look at all the abuse I've had to endure over the past year and change. I don't care how many nonblack people get upset about it because I know the alternative is no Black folks being here.

     So until you've got something that actually protects us and allows us to exist here with zero harassment, miss me with the complaints. I don't care.

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     - (hyphen@duwa.ng)'s status on Friday, 18-Oct-2024 03:46:39 JST -

     in reply to
     @tillshadeisgone rejection is painful. we've evolved to feel almost-physical pain upon rejection. it is punishing and often unfair when done to a collective (like people of an instance for maybe one or a few of them), it is punishing when done by a collective. i understand thematic instances doing allowlists, and i don't think there's any problem with that. i understand users doing domain blocks and i don't think there's any problem with that. those are examples of people exercising their personal boundaries a priori.
     criticism doesn't have to mean you're doing something right. there are probably many trolls creating noise and drowning legitimate interest in improving the moderation situation, but listen though. people are expressing concern that social decisions are being made for them, or against them, that they don't feel direct involvement in.
     
     and if anyone thinks "just go to another instance", it doesn't work like this. every instance has a different view of fedi, just because federation is not full distribution. a move is not without losses. fragmenting your social media identity across different accounts is similarly not something many enjoy.
     
     i don't think our current blocklist mechanisms for general-purpose or public-forum-like instances should be regarded with the same level of acceptance (as an effective moderation mechanism) as allowlists or user level domain blocks. i see many issues.
     i also don't think expressing being upset about e.g. fediblock should be equivalent to, or example of, abusive/troll/harassment behavior...
     
     people would rightfully feel upset at the prospect of arbitrarily losing the opportunity to connect and interact with whole instances of other people. both those of the blocking instance and of the blocked instance. they would feel even more upset at the prospect of such denial being catastrophic and not an instance-by-instance decision, or even user by user decision. that is, it is especially upsetting when those mechanisms feel lump-summed.
     and created as they are, there's really not enough emphasis on putting the effort to explain why, with evidence, a certain instance was blocked whole. and currently the focus is on blocking whole lists of instances for varying short-sentence reasons rather than vetting on instance-by-instance basis or tagging instances with a predefined set of tags so that blocking is customizable based on each instance people's set of values.
     
     currently it feels like many instances are their own monarchies doing alliances and driving schisms in the fedi community at large, rather than collectives of people with similar interests drawing their own boundaries which they all agreed on.
     i've seen many blocks "by federation" or "by running software", not even association.
     also, once added on a blocklist, there's usually no streamlined mechanism to appeal and retract the blocking. admins would usually have to go on an instance-by-instance quest and/or directly contact whomever runs things to explain why that was a bad decision. it's much easier to just say fuck it, their loss.
     
     i've talked in length before about why i think fediblock sucks in its current form. probably raised other points that don't come to mind currently. ironically, even after being invested in improving it, im writing this from a single-user instance that is currently blocked by a whole bunch of instances for one of those false-positive decisions.
     carl marks repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     carl marks (tillshadeisgone@blackqueer.life)'s status on Saturday, 19-Oct-2024 03:12:48 JST carl marks

     in reply to

     • -

     @hyphen TBS is shorthand for The Bad Space, one example of a shared blocklist based on a few servers.

     To respond to your central point, I completely disagree because you are missing essential context and we are looking at boundaries and abuse in different ways. When I am talking about the abuse I have experienced, I am speaking of not just singular instances of mistreatment. I am speaking of individual examples of a wider system of abuse known as white supremacy. When someone calls me a nigger, it's not just individual mistreatment that is making me upset. It's the fact that this is part of a pattern which is part of a system, all the violence of which is brought to bear against Black folks.

     My instance was created on the fediverse in the larger context of rampant antiblackness that rules this network. Within one or two days of me starting BQL, I had multiple people reach out to me to caution me that not too long ago, another instance that centered Black folks was repeatedly targeted by harassment campaigns until it had to be shut down. (Keep in mind that in turn, antiblackness on the fediverse is shaped by white supremacy writ large).

     So, when I made this instance, I was fully aware that antiblackness on and offline has already taken a massive toll on the people who I am trying to create a community space for. Because of that, I made an explicit commitment to actively moderate against antiblackness (in addition to other things) on our About page. That is a boundary I set as an administrator for my instance and by extension for my users, and everyone who signs up understands that and agrees to it when they request an account here. They come here because they know we all experience racist abuse by the white supremacist system and therefore we have a shared value in minimizing that as much as possible in our community space.

     My instance’s moderation style is therefore a collectivized boundary set up with my users’ consent in order to reduce as much as possible the amount of white supremacy they experience on the fediverse because we understand the power that whiteness holds. We understand the tremendous, dangerous, and violent accumulation of power that is white supremacy, and further we understand that we need to work together in order to redress that imbalance of power.

     Shared blocklists are just another layer of collectivization. There is so much white supremacy and fascism present on this network that almost no Black users last long in this environment. Almost no Black instances have lasted long here either. Because I imported a shared blocklist when I started this instance, the amount of racist abuse I would have had to experience personally would have driven me off too, due to the context of the systemic abuse I live under daily. Because I found a group of instance administrators who shared my antiracist values and boundaries and were willing to stick their necks out and share the boundaries they had previously set in the form of blocklists, I was relatively protected. So were my users.

     And so we're still here. I can't tell you how many times some Nazi instance will get posted to fediblock complete with receipts of systemic abuse and I'll check and we have had them defederated from the beginning of the server. Because of blocklists.

     It's a lot of people out here who claim to be principled because they oppose any kind of centralization/collectivization of moderation/boundary setting due to an ,"unfair accumulation of power". None of these people is ever as concerned about the unfair/violent accumulation of power that is white supremacy or the abuse that Black users experience on and offline as they are about being defederated by someone. It's the same thing with cases of sexual misconduct, a majority of people are more concerned about the rights of the person causing the harm than they are about the person who was harmed. It's the same dynamic. And yes, it is abusive. Systemically abusive.

     Hence why I say I don't want to hear it.

   • Embed this notice
     - (hyphen@duwa.ng)'s status on Saturday, 19-Oct-2024 03:13:00 JST -

     in reply to
     @tillshadeisgone sure if u need a tool, even if it's crude and coarse, absolutely use it. fediverse isn't safe by design and most of the moderation tools in fedi softwares were an afterthought. privileged folks rarely consider the social effects & think it's no big deal so it's not a cornerstone of their designs. like u probably already know how to this day dm-style posts are completely readable thru the network and access control is only enforced on the edges.
     idk ur specific instance's needs and it's the first time i interacted with it i think. i may be missing context around this post. happy to see the effort to make a safe space for black queers though.
     
     i was just disagreeing with your take -- likening people who are upset with blocklists to abusers & then framing instance blocks (usually a single person or small group of people's decision, made for and against a large number of people), to be a personal boundaries thing..
     instance blocklists are admins collectivising their moderation work, not users collectivising their personal boundaries. it's a centralisation & reduction of value systems onto (sometimes algorithmic!) efforts made by the few with their prejudices at play. it is wholly antidemocratic and a problematic accumulation of power if u wanna look at it philosophically.
     
     then i was providing evidence for why being upset about it could be legitimate.
     
     so yea this is a general systems issue from my single user instance pov. you for example could be having no ideological problems with people who don't use mastodon software, there's no precedent of them harassing black queers and some could be queer instances themselves, but a good chunk of a blocklist you might've applied could be blocked for that reason. i think there's something deeply wrong with this wholesale approach for that reason.
     the alternative option of just letting moderation happen organically as you interact with a slowly expanding federation circle isn't that great for everyone either. it exposes the admin and the users to unsavory things at least once before the block happens.
     
     i'm hoping we're not satisfied with either approach and we come up with something better for moderating federated networks.
     
     what's tbs btw?
     carl marks repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     NinjaDebugger (ninjadebugger@mastodon.sandwich.net)'s status on Saturday, 19-Oct-2024 05:01:54 JST NinjaDebugger

     in reply to

     @tillshadeisgone

     <Mastodon> Everybody should be able to curate their feeds.
     <Black Folks> Great, we made a tool so we can curate our feeds together!
     <Mastodon> NO NOT LIKE THAT

   • Embed this notice
     Silver Huskey (silver_huskey@fandom.ink)'s status on Saturday, 19-Oct-2024 05:22:04 JST Silver Huskey

     in reply to

     @tillshadeisgone It's really telling about who complains about these lists. Way too many people badly want the right to harass us. Nothing gets the worst actors on the Fediverse going like black folks taking steps to protect ourselves.

   • Embed this notice
     carl marks (tillshadeisgone@blackqueer.life)'s status on Sunday, 20-Oct-2024 03:51:17 JST carl marks

     in reply to

     • -

     @hyphen two things. One, I think part of our disconnect is showing up when you say you didn't know this was all part of some meta. While it's true that there has been history, this issue applies in a much wider context than drama on the fediverse. Any social media platform engaging in discussions about trust and safety in reference to blocklists is going to have an overlying meta issue with white supremacist abuse because as I stated and you acknowledged this is a larger societal problem. So yes, there's a meta, but there's always going to be a meta because white supremacy always hates us and white folks will consistently show up and reflexively push back on whatever tools we try to use to defend ourselves.

     Secondly and relatedly, I suspect you didn't like the analogy in my second paragraph because while it's not solely about you it does apply to you. Just like how you should not isolate a philosophical discussion of tools like blocklists from the material experiences of Black folks (which is what you were doing, despite my clear signaling that my discussion was grounded in antiracism) you also need to acknowledge that the impact of your words in this thread, whether intentional or not, is that you showed up and did the thing that white folks always find some excuse to do and pushed back on a Black person trying to leverage tools to protect themselves. You questioned my characterization of the issue of boundaries and collectivization and claimed I was being overly broad in my analysis of people who critique blocklists. While doing so, you handily sidestepped the material systemic context that I was explicitly naming from the first post I made. In effect, you were doing the exact thing that I called out in that last paragraph.

     So, despite your claims of allyship and flaunting of your "ally actions" (yes, another thing clueless white folks like to do), if you cannot admit those two points then you are correct that we should leave this here.

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     - (hyphen@duwa.ng)'s status on Sunday, 20-Oct-2024 03:51:30 JST -

     in reply to
     @tillshadeisgone i was missing essential context yes. a close friend approached me last night and told me this post might have actually been part of a long & deep meta which i had no part in and which she was keeping up with. she explained to me what was going on with your instance and you added some here. so apologies if i came off insensitive or shared some arguments with concern-trolls etc. tbh i wouldn't have approached this post if i knew it was part of some meta.
     
     there was a mismatch between what i understood of the original post and the events you were likely subposting. i hope my complaints didn't look like this abusive behavior you speak of, when viewed in that context.
     i understood your original post to be talking about blocklists as a mechanism in general, and the equally general reactions to it. it was weird to me how the post went from expressing frustration with complaints to calling those complaints abusive behavior.
     
     yes, hypocrites exist. i understand the dynamic you're describing in your last paragraph: victim blaming and defending the aggressor, selective morality and preaching equal treatment when it benefits bad faith actors, all that jazz.
     the kind of upset i was talking about and the kind of upset that came with the abuse you faced are nothing alike. i'm not making a point against deplatforming racists or isolating them, and i'm not minimizing the risk of instances which express the full intent of endangering vulnerable people under the notion of some free speech absolutism. we don't disagree on having to address systemic injustices rather than pretending they no longer exist.
     
     i am genuinely glad to see people trying to carve out spaces where systemically vulnerable people are protected.
     a community like yours exists local to me and i am part of it, so i understand the need for protective tools regardless of philosophical objections. hell, my local community is on discord and i think both of us understand how much that's an ass place to build a community in, but it is what enabled the community to survive & thrive, so be it.
     
     i don't appreciate the analogy you drew in your last paragraph onto "a lot of people" while quoting me. i will choose to assume good faith with it nonetheless and we can talk about it maybe in a different less charged context. there's lots of criticism about blocklists which isn't destructive and/or hypocritical.
     or we can just disengage here at this point. hopefully with no hard feelings.