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!

Thanks very much for wading in, @alyaza@beehaw.org - and thanks again to all the mods for taking action here. Any thread about racism in the fediverse becomes evidence of racism in the fediverse, sigh.

More positively, though, I got some very helpful feedback here from @Kwakigra@beehaw.org, @SweetCitrusBuzz@beehaw.org and @kalanggam@beehaw.org ... which is appreciated, and testimony to the fact that clearly a lot of people on Beehaw do get it!

Thanks much! And yeah, comes with the territory. Check out the discussion on lemmy.world - https://lemmy.world/post/18261593

If there was a rule I violated, my apologies! But I also didn't see anything about it.

Thanks much, I very much appreciate the supportive words! And, great analysis, thanks for that as well. Although, if you think things are bad here you should see the lemmy.world thread, where it's down to -47. And just imagine how much worse it would be if I were Black!

From the very beinning of the article, in the quote from tillshadeisgone:

"In recent days, folks such as @ErickaSimone@mastodon.social, @KimCrayton1@dair-community.social, @timnitGebru@dair-community.social ... and many, MANY more have been speaking out about how toxic fedi culture is for Black folks and how the tools we have access to just aren't enough."

There are also several links to articles with a lot more detail on the fediverse's history of anti-Blackness.

No, "color blindness" perpetuates structural racism. Here's one study looking at that. Seeing Race Again Countering Colorblindness across the Disciplines has a lot more, although it's focused on law and academia.

Yeah, the section on "Listen more to Black people" didn't really cover the challenges on Lemmy. I added this:

If you're on a platform like Lemmy which doesn't yet have similar hubs, it's more challenging. One option is to use other social networks, news aggregators, and search engines to find articles, papers, and videos by Black people – and post them yourself to help others listen.

How's that?

The very first sentence in in quote at the beginning of the article describes what prompted this

"In recent days, folks such as @ErickaSimone@mastodon.social, @KimCrayton1@dair-community.social, @timnitGebru@dair-community.social ... and many, MANY more have been speaking out about how toxic fedi culture is for Black folks and how the tools we have access to just aren't enough."

If you want examples, there are links in the first paragraph of the article (after the quote), and section #1 describes how to find more. The first paragraph also defines anti-Blackness:

beliefs, attitudes, actions, practices, and behaviors of individuals, institutions, software, and systems that devalue, minimize, and marginalize the full participation of Black people

From the article

Dr. Johnathan Flowers' The Whiteness of Mastodon, Ra’il I'Nasah Kiam and Marcia X's Blackness in the Fediverse, and the links in Dogpiling, weaponized content warning discourse, and a fig leaf for mundane white supremacy have some of the history.

And, it gives cops another excuse to overpolice Black and brown neighborhoods.

Today almost no instances run ads (misskey is as far as I know the only platform that's got support for ads) and Threads is the only one that does tracking. I'm using "free fediverses" the way https://freefediverse.org/index.php/Main_Page does -- instances that reject federation with Meta.