I do really like it here, but it's super clear that Black folk and POC are absolutely not having the same nice peaceful experience as I am, and until that changes I'm not gonna be all-in on this place.
I learned exponentially more from listening to the experiences of these folk on the birdsite than I did from any "equality and diversity initiative", and if they're not coming here then that's a huge problem.
It's an awful social problem, but also an interesting technical one. How do you allow for federation via hash tags without allowing any random racist to spin up a server every day in order to harass all the blm and woke tags they can find in their timeline before they are blocked?
I am new to the fediverse, but it seems to me that the defaults are wrong, new instances (and perhaps accounts) should have limited privilege until they prove themselves to be good citizens. Currently they are allowed all the privilege until they prove themselves to be bad, which is a perpetual game of whack-o-mole.
This would require a bit more communal effort of course, and it's not at all clear how that would be done. But if possible, it would be much better than the current situation, as long as there is some kind of gradual process when instances go rotten. This is the other side of the coin, instances can be de-federated from small infractions, whereas a gradual and considered approach would be preferable.
No clue if that is even technically feasible with the current protocols, but I felt like musing on this topic.
