Feedback welcome! Here’s the TL;DR list
- Listen more to more Black people
- Post less – and think before you post
- Call in, call out, and/or report anti-Blackness when you see it
- Support Black people and Black-led instances and projects
Other suggestions?
Apologies if I’m talking out of turn, I want to do my best to be a good ally but I recognize that I’ve got some serious blind spots!
With that caveat in mind, I would suggest that the problem making fedi unwelcoming is two-pronged:
1 ) It looks to me that fedi inherited the original sin of microblogging, which is that the system naturally rewards the spiciest hot takes that go with the local social currents.
2 ) Fedi’s culture was established by FOSS geeks rebelling against for-profit social media.
This has led to most instances becoming machines for manufacturing hot takes are going to have an unacceptably high mayonnaise content, highlighting the importance of your points 1 and 2! Nerds have to learn to slow down and think before shooting their mouth off, but it’s so tough to cut through the weird high school grievance politics.
(That mindset is a big part of what generated the whole problematic LessWrong/Techfash wave; your post fits in nicely with awful.system’s core mission!)
My impression is that Twitter avoided this because it was initially colonized by a more representative cross-section of society. This can be somewhat remediated via your points 3 and 4, but will face resistance – which kind of kills the fun of using fediverse for so many of the fedi-curious. This is a big problem when people can just go to bsky or whatever and find much of their old Twitter network already setting up shop and reconnecting with their communities.
Thankfully, some individual instances (like awful!) seem to get it, but for the most part the poison is already baked in, and it’s hard to unbake a cake and begin again. It will also be tough to get the existing core fedi community to understand that no level of “technical excellence” can fix what is fundamentally a social issue. Unlike baseball ghosts, actual people are under no obligation to come just because you built it!
Other than the kind of long, tough reckoning that society as a whole needs to face, it’s tough to see an answer. Do you think it would be possible to somehow begin and again have a “second genesis” of fedi, now that the wider world is more invested in finding alternatives to “big social?”
Thanks for working on this!
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!
This is definitely a pathology at this point.
Should I also give myself several lashings in repentance?
no I’ll do it for you
tbh it looks like that whole lemmy instance is pure lolbertarian trash.
I was honestly gonna defed just by the domain name alone but I was finally able to check out their instance and hoo boy of course there’s a Nazi-looking skull logo
With that domain name, who could have predicted?
You’re just being asked to be thoughtful before opening your mouth. Is that so awful?
We’re at an inflection point where millions of people might be able to break free of the big social media companies. People are disgusted at the incumbents and are looking for someplace, anyplace to land.
Unfortunately, “Don’t be a dick” is in the critical path to success for the fediverse, We, the currently existing community, have to make it worth their while to jump to fedi, because if it’s a hassle, they’re just going to go somewhere else like bsky or Threads. Then we’ll all dragged along via network effects, riding the Wheel of Pain for another decade or so until that platform enshitifies and we maybe get another bite at the apple
You’re really illustrating the problem the OP is trying to fix quite nicely.
Instead of dropping a turd on our doorstep, why not have a policy of not commenting on stuff in places that you don’t really belong, like an normal person would in their regular life.
BTW, having a fedi-wide stream of popular posts was a mistake.
You’re just being asked to be thoughtful before opening your mouth. Is that so awful?
Mate you’re basically denying the whole identity of a certain kind of poster, if opening their mouth required thoughtfullness they’d be forever silent and turn to dust
