Skip Navigation

InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)T

The Nexus of Privacy

@ thenexusofprivacy @lemmy.blahaj.zone

Posts
86
Comments
135
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • 4 things white people can do to start making the fediverse less toxic for Black people (DRAFT!)

    Jump

  • Thanks very much for wading in, @alyaza@beehaw.org - and thanks again to all the mods for taking action here. Any thread about racism in the fediverse becomes evidence of racism in the fediverse, sigh.

    More positively, though, I got some very helpful feedback here from @Kwakigra@beehaw.org, @SweetCitrusBuzz@beehaw.org and @kalanggam@beehaw.org ... which is appreciated, and testimony to the fact that clearly a lot of people on Beehaw do get it!

  • 4 things white people can do to start making the fediverse less toxic for Black people (DRAFT!)

    Jump

  • Thanks very much for wading in!

  • 4 things white people can do to start making the fediverse less toxic for Black people (DRAFT!)

    Jump

  • Good feedback, thanks much. I did check with Black people about directing folks to #BlackMastodon and the @ blackfedi group -- but I should probably be more explicit about not posting their, and your general point about not barging into spaces where you're not invited is importat and something I should highlight. I'll add something to the "and tht's not all" section about working on your biases and behaviors more generally. And also good point about stressing the intersectional aspects more. Greatly appreciated!

  • 4 things white people can do to start making the fediverse less toxic for Black people (DRAFT!)

    Jump

  • Thanks much, I very much appreciate the supportive words! And, great analysis, thanks for that as well. Although, if you think things are bad here you should see the lemmy.world thread, where it's down to -47. And just imagine how much worse it would be if I were Black!

  • 4 things white people can do to start making the fediverse less toxic for Black people (DRAFT!)

    Jump

  • These things are basic, but most white people aren't doing them -- even people who think of themselves as staunchly pro Black. And there are multiple examples in the article of how white people might be impacting Black people unintentionally, for example thisiswomanswerk talks about how hand-wringing messages of symptay many times are themselves microaggresive, and suggestions like "Stop asking Black people for evidence of the anti-Blackness" and "Stop telling Black people that they'll experience less racism if they change instances (aka servers)"

  • 4 things white people can do to start making the fediverse less toxic for Black people (DRAFT!)

    Jump

  • 4 things white people can do to start making the fediverse less toxic for Black people (DRAFT!)

    Jump

  • Yeah, the section on "Listen more to Black people" didn't really cover the challenges on Lemmy. I added this:

    If you're on a platform like Lemmy which doesn't yet have similar hubs, it's more challenging. One option is to use other social networks, news aggregators, and search engines to find articles, papers, and videos by Black people – and post them yourself to help others listen.

    How's that?

  • 4 things white people can do to start making the fediverse less toxic for Black people (DRAFT!)

    Jump

  • Thanks, all good points, I'll try to work them in! The boosting is somewhat tricky, the general guideline is "boost posts tht people want boosted, don't boost posts that they don't want boosted", but it's not always clear which is which (unless they. have "Please boost" in there somewhere)

  • 4 things white people can do to start making the fediverse less toxic for Black people (DRAFT!)

    Jump

  • Thanks! It's an important point but I'm not surprised it's meeting with such pushback here. And, to be fair, as somebody pointed out in another thread, the current title of the section doesn't match the current text, which focuses more narrowly on posting less specifically about anti-Blackness ... so there's room for improvement. But, my guess is that's not why most people are downvoting it 🤣

  • 4 things white people can do to start making the fediverse less toxic for Black people (DRAFT!)

    Jump

  • The very first sentence in in quote at the beginning of the article describes what prompted this

    "In recent days, folks such as @ErickaSimone@mastodon.social, @KimCrayton1@dair-community.social, @timnitGebru@dair-community.social ... and many, MANY more have been speaking out about how toxic fedi culture is for Black folks and how the tools we have access to just aren't enough."

    If you want examples, there are links in the first paragraph of the article (after the quote), and section #1 describes how to find more. The first paragraph also defines anti-Blackness:

    beliefs, attitudes, actions, practices, and behaviors of individuals, institutions, software, and systems that devalue, minimize, and marginalize the full participation of Black people

  • 4 things white people can do to start making the fediverse less toxic for Black people (DRAFT!)

    Jump

  • Yep. Agreed both about encouraging people to move to tools that better fit their needs -- and also agreed that it's a symptom, not a cause. Part of the challenge is that migrating from Mastodon to another platform (or for that matter even from one Mastodon instance to another) you lose your posting history, and there isn't any good way to move an entire instance yet. And yes, Lemmy has a problem.

  • 4 things white people can do to start making the fediverse less toxic for Black people (DRAFT!)

    Jump

  • Indeed. Funny how that works! Glad you thought it was reasonable, and agreed that point 2 needs work.

  • 4 things white people can do to start making the fediverse less toxic for Black people (DRAFT!)

    Jump

  • Thanks, glad you like it! And yeah, there have indeed been some reddit-like things said in this thread. Oh well, comes with the territory. The lemmy.blahaj.zone thread is somewhat better so far (famous last words).

    My guess is that the fediverse will split into regions that decide to address anti-Blackness (and everything else) and others that ... don't. Similarly, some platforms will focus on improving safety and others ... won't. Lemmy's likely to be in the "won't" category but time will tell!

  • 4 things white people can do to start making the fediverse less toxic for Black people (DRAFT!)

    Jump

  • It's time for a hard fork of Mastodon (DRAFT, REVISION IN PROGRESS)

    Jump

  • To get feedback! I often send out drafts to newsletter subscribers and post them on Mastodon and in the !thenexusofprivacy@lemmy.blahaj.zone community ... I got a lot of good feedback on this one which is incorporated in the revised version.

  • Eight tips about consent for fediverse developers

    Jump

  • Thanks for the tipoff on having to turn off the VPN, it's not at all intentional -- and it's not a good look for a site with privacy in its name! I'll try to figure out what's going on, it's pretty vanilla Ghost / nginx hosted on a Digital Ocean droplet so not immediately obvious.

    And yeah, it'll be interesting to see how well the messaging you for approval works out in practice. As you could say it could look like phishing; and even if it's fine when just one app is doing it, it'll be annoying if there are hundreds. Also, there's a Mastodon setting to silently ignore DMs (and I think other platforms have similar options as well). And for Bridgy Fed, it would be great to have a mechanism that works symmetrically between the fediverse and Bluesky ... but Bluesky doesn't have DMs. Tricky!

    I should probably mention something about being a good ally in that section, that's a good suggestion. That's not the main message I'm trying to convey though, I really do mean it as a warning to cis guys to be careful. These firestorms are tiresome for everybody, ould we please just not? Also btw sometimes particularly unpleasant for whoever sets them off. But maybe there's a better way to word it.

  • Eight tips about consent for fediverse developers

    Jump

  • Thanks, glad you think they're reasonable. I don't see it as using ActivitiyPub implying consent; it's more that ActivityPub doesn't provide any mechanisms to enforce consent. So mechanisms like domain blocking, "authorized fetch", and local-only posts are all built on top of ActivityPub. I agree that many people want something different than ActivityPub currently provides, it'll be interesting to see how much the protocol evolves, how far people can go with the approach of building on top of the protocol, or whether there's shift over time to a different protocol which has more to say about safety, security, privacy, and consent.

  • Eight tips about consent for fediverse developers

    Jump

  • Thanks for the feedback -- and thanks for reading them despite the bristling. I couldn't come up with a better way to put them ... I know they'll cause some people to tune out, but oh well, what can you do.

    I don't think these solutions are inherently unscalable, it's more that there hasn't ever been a lot of effort put into figuring out how to make things scalable so we don't have any great suggestions yet. I wrote about this some in The free fediverses should focus on consent (including consent-based federation), privacy, and safety (the article is focused on instances that don't federate with Threads, but much of it including this section is true more generally):

    There aren't yet a lot of good tools to make consent-based federation convenient scalable, but that's starting to change. Instance catalogs like The Bad Space and Fediseer, and emerging projects like the FIRES recommendation system. FSEP's design for an"approve followers" tool, could also easily be adapted for approving federation requests. ActivityPub spec co-author Erin Shepherd's suggestion of "letters of introduction", or something along the lines of the IndieWeb Vouch protocol, could also work well at the federation level. Db0's Can we improve the Fediverse Allow-List Model? and the the "fedifams" and caracoles I discuss in The free fediverses should support concentric federations of instances could help with scalability and making it easier for new instances to plug into a consent-based network.

    (The post itself has links for most of these.)

  • How to block Threads on Mastodon

    Jump

  • Sorry about that -- and thanks for letting me know, it was down briefly but got back on its feet fairly quickly!