Looking at all the responses to our announcement yesterday, pretty much everyone who spoke on it on any detail quoted and discussed Esther’s portion - the pervasive misogyny and transmisogyny on this network and the fear of retaliation-by-defederation ...
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Looking at all the responses to our announcement yesterday, pretty much everyone who spoke on it on any detail quoted and discussed Esther’s portion - the pervasive misogyny and transmisogyny on this network and the fear of retaliation-by-defederation for speaking on it.
Which makes sense. She’s saying things many people have been aware of, or felt, and put words to it. And it touches upon the way many people who don’t use Fedi, feel about it.
I’m calling it the misogynistic negligent liberal civility complex.
Her words are extremely poignant and I’m glad people are taking note. I hope it leads to reflection and change.
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In my part I spoke about things that still scare me, that I realised late last night had actually caused PTSD.
I have CPTSD anyway so it took me a year to realise that having a panic attack when you see certain handles or servers or phrases is not at all normal.
I was pretty upset that what I had wrote had not been quoted or remarked upon more than in passing - generally referred to has “abuse” if mentioned at all. And we both did certainly suffer abuse, independently and together.
I talked about some pretty nasty and specific stuff in my part, stuff that I think wasn’t pulled out because what really can you do about it?
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How do you fix a problem like sometimes a user will send you a detailed description of how you’re going to kill yourself because you’ll never be a real man?
Or someone finding your dead name and using it to sign up to your server?
Or someone sending you anonymous threats suggesting an attack, behind several layers of obfuscation, that keep you up all night in fear?
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These are specific bad actors. You can suspend them, but that doesn’t really mean much. They’ll find another way to get to you, or find their next target.
I suppose there’s not a lot you -can- do. Which is perhaps why it wasn’t remarked upon much.
I don’t know. As I wrote in the blog post this isn’t my first rodeo, and marginalised people will surely suffer this at some point online.
But even on Twitter I only got Nazis threatening to burn down my house that one time. Even on BlueSky when someone chooses to misgender me or pile on, it hurts but feels different.
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Perhaps it’s because I am an Admin. That separates you out into something different.
As an Admin you feel a responsibility to protect the people on your instance from that stuff, and I tried my best (sometimes failed) to not mention it to make sure our instance mates didn’t feel unsafe. And to also avoid further attacks, best not to feed the shitlords.
Of course, Esther and I continuously supported each other, I’m so glad we did this together.
But it did often mean I was suffering in silence on the whole. Esther too, when the threats sometimes included her.
I find the Fediverse, as an admin, to be a tremendously lonely place.
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@james a lot of what you talked about felt more.. universal to me. A lot of it felt like just the sort of depravity that can be found inside a lot of humanity
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Firm request: do not come here to suggest ways I could have stopped people abusing me. Do not tell me this is just something you have to suffer on a federated network. Do not talk to me about how civility and liberalism is good. Do not tell me that you don’t see this stuff.
I will eat you alive. I have the time.
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I think it's one of the most important problems we can work on.
Mastodon/ActivityPub/Fediverse finally gives us enough power to start the discussion.
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I think that these are age old problems we’ve always been able to discuss. And in some ways, the nature of the Fediverse makes it worse.
Mastodon (the software we use) has been around for 8 years and people have been talking about this long before me. Particularly people of colour and indigenous folks experiencing constant racist harassment.
But if the discussions are happening, and keep happening, I’m glad.