this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2023
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As I understand it, one of the major issues with moving to e.g. Mastodon is that the Fediverse doesn't implement blocking in a way that you'd expect, at all. It's effectively impossible to block someone the way we're used to blocking in places like Twitter, Instagram.
I have also heard a lot of stories from Black folks about anti-Black sentiment on Mastodon.
Blocking seems to work fine on Mastodon (kbin is a whole other story; it is a trash fire), but the big thing was the Mastodon HOA (the Mastodon users who will rock up to tell you you’re doing Mastodon wrong and yell at you for wishing for something like quote tweets) and some servers insisting Black folks put posts talking about racism they experienced behind content warnings. Plus some just blatant racism. Being told to just make your own server or move to a new one hit like needing a dang Green Book just to be on the platform.
A lot of Black folks who went to try Mastodon during the first round of migrations off Twitter after Elon bought it got chased off of Mastodon, and they warned folks away.
Can you explain? Why blocking is not possible?
That makes me sad to hear.
I don't remember seeing any specifically anti-black sentiment, BUT as one of the "50% old white tech nerd gr[e]ybeards" mentioned by someone else, with a very limited set of account and hashtags follows, chances are I haven't been in the right (wrong?) place to see it / call it out. Or I've been too naïve to notice.
Political and pro/anti-woke propaganda and things like that definitely exist on the Federated "tab" which almost certainly come with a side order of racism, but those people are everywhere online.
Maybe the self-enforced walled garden of only following trusted people and certain hashtags could work.
After all, the LGBT+ community seems to be doing fairly well on there (ditto furries), and if there's one kind of prejudice, I'd be surprised if they're not getting abuse too.
Yeah, it's very sad.
The core of the issue is that it's too easy for us privileged folks to suggest things like - and I'm not trying to pick on you at all here - that vulnerable people stay in any sort of "self-enforced walled garden" rather than robust moderation tools and the human resources to use them to their full potential.
Voluntary separation is better than enforced separation, but yes, I get where you're coming from.
The thing is, the entire reason - I assume - that there is a search for a new place to tweet / microblog is that there has been some intrusion or destabilisation of previous - perhaps unwitting - voluntary separation(s).
Whether this pseudo-volunteering was black communities keeping to certain, um, "places"(?; there has to be a better word; subjects? hashtags? keywords?) for community content, like-minded safe spaces and chat or whether it was merely other people respectfully (or otherwise) staying out of those places, I'm not entirely sure. Maybe a little of both?
Something was definitely going on for Black Twitter to have been the phenomenon it was after all.