Lady @Lady@cat.family

i've been tempted to block all the big instances we currently have silenced but idk… people here follow people there

not gay as in “on netflix”, lesbian as in “censored on social media for ties to porn”

@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.

i can’t post what i’m currently listening to because it hasn’t been added to MusicBrainz yet and my flow depends on that

lots of women run instances, the registrations are just closed

like sure the big instances new users might be creating accounts on these days tend to be operated by men but that’s because men have difficulty setting boundaries lmao

is there a shortage of instances with woman admins? i feel like of the admins i follow it’s about half and half

new fediversians: not every instance shares your character count or formatting limitations

gdi glitch-soc still doesn't support hex code character escapes lmao

The GlitchCat #SundayPost offers news and updates from our corner of the fediverse to yours.

§ Special Note :—

It’s been almost a year since I’ve done one of these, which I am blaming on starting a new job last December (🎉). GlitchCat has been chugging along fine in that time, and even been upgraded once or twice!

§ Instance News :—

• In a belated embodiment of the American Dialect Society’s 2016 Word of the Year, Elon Musk has finally finalized his purchase of Twitter, resulting in a predictably large influx of new users to the fediverse. You can catch some of them on the #introductions hashtag, and hopefully a few actually stick around this time to invest in our infrastructure—in contrast to all the ⁜other⁜ times that large number of users have claimed to be leaving Twitter and then returned once that gesture ceased to have performative weight. (New users who are reading this: Welcome; reach out if you have any questions; and ⁜please⁜ get off mastodon.social & mastodon.online!!)

• Mastodon is nearing a release of version 4·0, which will come with some significant changes to the appearance of “static” (non·web·app) areas of the site—by which I mostly mean they are being removed. Local users: Please do reach out to me with any feelings about these changes and the direction you think we should go with our fork. We will probably be having more indepth conversations about this in the weeks to come.

§ From Our Users :—

• @Lady: I have released version 0·2·0 of my Ecmascript library for dealing with custom, userdefined character sets, Kijch. This version contains notable improvements in processing and laying out strings of text, in anticipation of future work to automate this with H·T·M·L Custom Elements.

• @aescling: Usage by white-supremacists in online memes led the Anti-Defamation League to list Pepe the Frog as part of their “Hate on Display” collection of hate symbols. Although the A·D·L acknowledges that “many Pepe the Frog memes are not bigoted in nature” and even teamed up with creator Matt Furie for a Pepe reclamation campaign in 2016, the potential for antisemitic and white-supremacist connotations in the eyes of users make its use in a project’s branding, at the very least, a highly questionable P·R decision. Nevertheless, the popular adblocking extension ‘Twitch AdBlock’ decided to do just that, so this week æscling created a Pepe·less fork for those users who don’t want to be reminded, in the midst of a Twitch stream, of a meme wot significantly gained prominence through its association with hate speech and platforms where hate speech is common.

• @Satsuma: This week Satsuma gave a presentation on Weeks v. United States (1914). Although they claimed this achievement was “color text mostly”, I’m trying to pressure them to get it on the internet for the rest of us to see 😈.

§ Holidays and Observances :—

• Last Sunday marked the official start of the Hallowtide season in the KIBI calendar. Set at the end of autumn, Hallowtide is the season for acknowledging strife, reckoning with debility, and remembering the dead.

• The month of November is widely observed among writers—sometimes derisively—as NaNoWriMo, the National [nation unclear] Novel Writing Month. While this author believes that the ethos of NaNoWriMo fundamentally fails to comprehend literature—akin to a game review wot uses “play time” as a proxy for “complexity” or “value”—I do encourage you to give writing a shot anyway. I’ll happily review whatever you have written!

• For those in the United States and Canada who recognize the ending of Daylight Savings Time, today is the day it ends!

• 🌺 11 November is Poppy Day, a day of remembrance for those killed or debilitated by global warfare. This topic is likely already in everybody’s minds due to the ongoing war in Ukraine; let us use the relatively comprehensive coverage of that European struggle to help nurture our empathy for the impacts of military conflict in the rest of the world. (Please do note that GlitchCat opposes the nationalistic use of the red poppy on this day, and advocates a white poppy instead.)

That’s all for this week!
— @Lady

it’s sunday, fuckers; time to focus on Us

too much signal these past few days

i can't believe i'm longing for a federated timeline of people i don't care about whinging about things i don't care about but

we will find out about chill people on the instances we’re already connected to eventually through osmosis. but if there are community connections we’re not making, let’s get some grease on those wheels?