@jdp23 @silver_huskey @matthewclair i’ll add to this that in my (white) experience (which is to say, observation), harrassment and racism towards Black (and other nonwhite/racialized) mastodon users tends to manifest through either microaggressions or (especially) lower levels of tolerance, meaning that:—

• it falls most heavily on people who are most visible (instance admins, vocal creators).

• it’s often less a situation of “explicit” antiblackness and more one of harsher penalties/backlash (and more criticism) than white users would face. [CW discourse is one example here, but not the only one.] because backlash is always backlash in *response* to something, this can make it really hard to get people to recognize.

[bear in mind of course that there is likely things i haven’t seen, but admins will typically ban “overt” racist actions; it’s the microaggressions/patterns of criticism/etc that they have a much harder time dealing with, because they are systemic.]

the mentioned large instance is probably playviscious. PV is a complicated issue because the owner (a Black man) did a number of things to legitimately anger a number of people (not just white people) on the fediverse, while at the same time the backlash the instance received was dispropotionate to what a white admin might expect. that’s typical here. [i don’t like the discourse around PV generally because it tends to focus a lot on him when, from my outside experience, it seemed like it was the other instance moderators (who were not men) who were doing all of the work, which he took a lot of credit for. regardless, the space itself was very important to a lot of nonwhite masto users, and a lot of people used its disappearance as evidence of the inherent racism of this space.]

it’s also difficult having these conversations because, due to the fact that there are so many white users on Masto and public posts do show up on local timelines and get seen by them, i think there is more context collapse here than there might have been on twitter. oftentimes people here will phrase things really strongly because they are trying to impress them on a not‐very‐conscious white audience, which might result in a different phasing than they might have used otherwise. for lack of a better word, talk of racism on fedi often feels very “loud”, like shouting at people to wake up, rather than actually discussing concrete approaches to solutions like one might find in a more inclusive (and less overtly white) space.

this also affects whose voices you hear; nonwhite people who speak about racism with a white audience in mind will get more boosts and visibility than those who don’t try to cater to white understanding. i do not think that the loudest voices in “the Mastodon Community” would *necessarily* still be the loudest voices if the community had a different makeup or priorities.