I really want to lift up the mods of the SFBA instance: @cd24, @Ingurido, @jeffkibuule
I, a Black woman, have had a marvelous experience on Mastodon because these mods don't play. For being a place-specific instance, SFBA has a very clearly expressed value system and it's reflected in the mods. They are proactive, even-handed, and respectful.
I wish others on #BlackMastodon and through the #BlackFediverse could say the same of their instance mods.
Does the Fediverse have a very NIMBY-like feel for newcomers of color? Absolutely. I noted that early.
Are some of Fedi conventions a bit...stuffy? You betcha.
Are there some problematic as hell users/instances on here? YEP.
This is why instance admins/mods are so important for newcomers.
I think the Fediverse can be a good place for community-building. But apathetic admins/mods and janky as hell instances that are the Fediverse equivalent of Rovers from Firefly, raiding users and poisoning every interaction, don't exactly make the experience easy for us.
Too bad there isn't a Fediverse Green Book, if you know what I mean.
@DeliaChristina (🤨 "Rovers"? are you trying to bait me?😆 )
What's the "stuffiness" you mention? I get the racist stuff: I cut my teeth on 4chan in the late '00s and early 2010s, and what I've seen on the fedi is similar. It's teen/tween edgelords who think being racist demonstrates their freedom of thought and intellect (it does, but the lack thereof), and bigots who... typically have something else going on.
Although I'm black, my being black has never been a prominent feature of any of my online personas. My face is on my Github profile, but that's about it. Probably because of that, I don't really get what most other black folks are talking about when they talk about not feeling welcome. I've thought about somehow being more intentionally, legibly black so I can understand what y'all are talking about, but I don't put my face everywhere for other reasons.
Here's what I saw as stuffy. Now I'm kinda curious to know if this matches what anyone else saw.
I noticed, when I first arrived, a whole lot of people telling newcomers that how they spoke was wrong, how they used (or did not use) content warnings was wrong, that they shouldn't talk about certain subjects, etc. It was offputting, made me consider not staying. Finally decided I would just be as I am, and if people don't like it, Mastodon gives them tools to avoid me.
@EverydayMoggie @DeliaChristina thanks. I get how it can feel like asking for a kind of self-editing, but I also see that a certain topic flooding a person's feed, for instance, can be tiring....I guess I see it like, at least most are saying with that, "I like seeing your posts, but I can't engage with [X topic] so frequently". CW actually are the tool in Mastodon to meet that situation. Rather than filtering or obscuring, it is like making engagement with whatever more intentional.
So, I think you're right that folks can just not follow you or block you, but I think CW are trying to avoid that and let people's voices be heard while also giving folks a break from things that might stress them out when they need it. It's not some platonic ideal of how to achieve that, but given the technical difficulty of some other approaches, I think what we've got is a viable local optimum
