This piece on "The Whiteness of Mastodon" is worth reading:
https://techpolicy.press/the-whiteness-of-mastodon/
One of my hopes was that if particular communities like #BlackTwitter could emerge & flourish on #Twitter -- which was not exactly built to encourage that kind of thing -- then it would actually be _easier_ for the same thing to happen on a nominally more open platform like Mastodon. This piece makes it clear that it's not that simple, & explains why.
@angusm I would like to make one correction to the information Dr. Jonathan Flowers shared in this podcast All of Black Twitter was not simply a "call and response" community addressing issues. There is a small nook of #BlavkTwitter that behaved as disability Twitter. The BlackandSTEM portion of Twitter is organized around nodes within the platform. I was one of the nodes in this community and was hoping that Mastodon would allow me to help rebuild the community here. I must rethink this plan after learning about Mastodon's anti-Black history and technical structure.
@BLACKandSTEMGlobal I still have hopes that Mastodon (or if not Mastodon, the fediverse generally) will come through, and prove to be better and more promising than its beginnings. But I thought that the article was a useful corrective -- certainly to my own thinking -- against being too naively optimistic, discounting the difficulties or imagining that the technology and culture is more neutral than it actually is.