Lady @Lady@cat.family

just wait literally three days and then publish your take

absolutely abhorrent that this is in a major newspaper

if you publish a piece before Wednesday which analyses the results of the upcoming United States midterm elections, i’m blocking you

because i don't (can't) proactively moderate against smaller instances with a handful of users until they become a problem, it's really important that the big instances we send posts to only federate to small instances which are friendly

my major concern is posts here showing up on federated timelines there and then getting boosted by someone outside our usual cultural sphere, leading to context collapse

moderation isn't good enough there to ensure that the people seeing and boosting our public posts are necessarily the people with our interests at heart

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