Something about starter packs that I think gets lost when they're discussed on Mastodon:

Lord Hurkle-Durkle :bc:

"there are a bunch of small, overtly racist / misogynist / etc instances that have amplified harassment campaigns against prominent Black people on here."

Maybe that's it. I've only ever been on Mastodon.social and beige.party really, and haven't seen the kinds of attacks that you're talking about, probably because of good moderation.

So really it's more of a moderation problem than anything, I would suppose.

Because even in real life, there are racists, but they typically moderate themselves at the grocery stores, whereas online they can let their true feelings and opinions fly, without regard to seeing the other person as a person.

I appreciate the link. I'll give it a read.

Lord Hurkle-Durkle :bc:

@thenexusofprivacy @ryanrandall

I also want to say that we should absolutely be blocking whole instances if they're allowing even one problematic account on them. Make it a bigger punishment and I think there will be less tolerance and more moderation? Maybe?

Dave Alvarado

@GuyDudeman @mastodonmigration @ErickaSimone @ryanrandall those are the same thing.

Lord Hurkle-Durkle :bc:

@dave @mastodonmigration @ErickaSimone @ryanrandall

I really feel that unintentional things that people do should be classified into a different category than intentional actions and words.

I don't blame the ignorant for their ignorance. I blame society for not teaching them.

Taggart :donor:

@vrruiz @kims @mekkaokereke @ecosdelfuturo Perhaps a fork run by an organization that has a paid Trust and Safety team for moderation, with clear terms and conditions. Maybe even a legal entity that can be sued for breach of contract to address harms.

I'm being cheeky, but if you want to fix Fedi, professionalize it.

The Nexus of Privacy

In general, yes, instance blocking can help encourage better moderation. But it's complex: instance blocking cuts communication between everybody on both instances, so especially for larger instances a lot of people who aren't behaving badly pay the price. mastodon.social is an extreme example of this -- not particularly well moderated (which isn't the moderators' fault, it's Eugen who's made the decision not to put enough resources into moderation and still keep it as open sigup, but still) so the source of a fair number of problems, but still a big loss to connectivity if you defederate.

(Also I think it's critical not to view instance blocking as punishment, it's really about safety and asserting boundaries. But that's a digression.)

@GuyDudeman @ryanrandall

Lord Hurkle-Durkle :bc:

@dave @mastodonmigration @ErickaSimone @ryanrandall

To expand on this thought - I've encountered people telling me that asking what I did wrong is a micro-aggression.

Like, I get that people are tired of being asked, but at least they're being asked. That shows that someone wants to do better and doesn't have ill-intent.

I think ill-intent is a very different thing from ignorance.

My kids don't know right from wrong until they're taught.

We have to teach people for them to learn. We can't just attack them and expel them, if they want to learn and discuss calmly and politely.

Lord Hurkle-Durkle :bc:

@thenexusofprivacy @ryanrandall

"especially for larger instances a lot of people who aren't behaving badly pay the price"

That would be the point. It would make those like me, who are unaware of these issues - aware of the issue straight away, and force the problem instances members and moderators to do something about it to fix the issue - prove that it's fixed or mitigated as best they can, and only then get re-federated.

Jon

GoToSocial and Letterbook, as well as Bonfire, are all examples of projects that are taking inclusivity and pro-social behavior seriously. GoToSocial also takes significantly less resources to run than Mastodon. It's a great point from @[email protected] about the barrier that Mastodon's expensiveness adds -- and this is also very much something Letterbook's keeping in mind.

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected]

Jon

This post is deleted!

Jon

I agree with @[email protected]'s perspecties in https://hachyderm.io/@jenniferplusplus/113550897068984768: Letterbook, Bonfire, and GoToSocial are three good examples. Today, GoToSocial is the best option for most small instances (although it's still in beta, and doesn't have all of Mastodon's functionality -- no post editing, you can't subscribe to relays, and minimal moderation tools). K&T hosting has a $3.75/month package, or people with basic Linux skills can use a small VPS -- I've got it on a digital ocean droplet, and the installation instructions were straightforward. It seems to work okay with Enafore (although I've only tried the basics -- home feed and notifications)

Letterbook is at an earlier stage. Bonfire is very flexible and it could well make sense for more complex proejcts, but I don't know anybody who's self-hosting on it yet.

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected]

Dave Alvarado

@GuyDudeman @mastodonmigration @ErickaSimone @ryanrandall I appreciate that you're trying to separate two classes of racism to make one ok, but I can't really help you with that. Racism is like cancer. Yes, there are more and less pernicious forms, but you still have cancer if you have any kind of cancer.

Microaggressions don't happen without the underlying intentional or unintentional bigotry. People just don't treat each other that way unless they have internalized some sort of superiority

Zack Cerza

@mekkaokereke BlueSky is a really fun place to be, and to me it's clear BlackSky is a large part of the reason. Part of why BlackSky is able to work so well is that the community is actually able to defend itself thanks to the agency granted by the platform's composable moderation features.

Not only does Mastodon not have similar features, it seems like ActivityPub itself is an obstacle to adding them. And the community here can be so damn condescending to people who have any feedback.

Lord Hurkle-Durkle :bc:

@dave @mastodonmigration @ErickaSimone @ryanrandall

You know what's funny? My first instinct and reaction to your reply literally was "Fuck you!"

I said it out loud, to the screen.

Then I thought about it. Why was that my initial reaction?

I think that was my reaction because it felt like you were accusing me of something that I don't see in myself, and which I find abhorrent.

It felt like you were saying that I am the very thing I'm trying to eradicate from the world, through discussion and learning.

My literal goal here is to educate not only myself but other white people about this issue, but I feel like I'm being attacked for that effort.

It makes it not worth the effort, because I'm just going to get called something that I'm not.

Jon

@mttaggart excellent post!

[email protected]

@[email protected]

Sharkey (and possibly other Misskey variants?) has starter packs: we call them "user lists." You can make a list of users, and you can choose to publish them on your profile.

It would be a nice convenience if you could view someone's list and click a button to automatically follow everyone on the list.

Miloš Jovanović

@engarneering @nullagent @mastodonmigration @ErickaSimone @ryanrandall social.coop seems to work fine and has funds to spare. a direct instance subscription doesn't have to be a lot.

i think where people get tripped up is attempting to replicate capitalist economics. that just won't work.

The Nexus of Privacy

@GuyDudeman I just reported a post on beige.party for racism. It's far from the worst example of racism I've seen but I'd say it was pretty blatant -- other people had already pointed it out but the person involved ignored it. Then again it's the kind of thing that many white people don't see as racist.

It sounds like you think that if mods don't act on it, the right next step is to call for a fediblock on beige.party. In practice, though, people on beige.party are likely to defend the person -- claiming that it wasn't intentional or whatever. Meanwhile others who have friends on beige.party who aren't saying racist things aren't going to know why their connections have been cut off, and if they find out why will generally think it's an overreaction. If mods haven't originally acted, the pressure on an issule like this is very unlikely to get them to change.

It would be great if that wasn't the case, but then again it would have been great if the person making the original problematic post had just listened to the original pushback and said "oh I get it", apologized, edited the post. But that didn't happen. Watch whiteness work.

@ryanrandall

Nelfaneor

@ryanrandall
Following the course of this conversation, that is exactly the question coming persistently to my mind, what about the other #Fediverse softwares ? Those already usable like #friendica (I've read it's really easier to manage on a domestic software than #mastodon) and all the other softwares still to be developed ?
@nullagent, why couldn't some black developers create a real black culture based software on the #activitypub ? @mastodonmigration @ErickaSimone

nullagent

@Nelfan @ryanrandall @mastodonmigration @ErickaSimone

I think you're missing part of the problem. Black devs are NOT the center of Black community and social trends and thus adoption of Black nerds is a helpful signal but woefully insignificant compared to adoption by average Black non techies.

There's a lot more here but in short the alternatives are too niche and suffer largely even worse marketing than Mastodon. We have yet to get the perfect mix of UX, marketing etc to get black normies.