Océane (@oceane)

Ericka Simone @ErickaSimone@mastodon.social

1y

Who knew the enshittification of the internet would lead to the enshittification of the entire planet.

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Jon @jdp23@blahaj.zone

1y

@ErickaSimone yep. it's one of the most frustrating things about the racism here. Decentralized social networks could be a counter-force, and Mastodon actually started with strong anti-fascist values -- in fact one of the "Lessons (so far) from Mastodon" in my 2017 post was "Policies against racism, sexism, discrimination against gender and sexual minorities, and Nazis are extremely appealing positioning these days." It's still just as true today!

But unfortunately another one of the lessons is also just as true today.

"Even with an explicit anti-harassment, anti-fascism, and anti-racism focus, people of color are likely to be marginalized if the most influential people are white. Other patterns that are likely to occur as well (as elsewhere online):
— cis men are likely to prioritize anti-harassment functionality lower than women and gender-diverse people.
— harassment is more likely to be directed at women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ people.
— impacts are likely to fall most heavily on women of color, and in particular queer women of color."

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Océane @oceane@peculiar.florist

1y

@ErickaSimone @jdp23 I'm sorry to bring up my own ideas unprompted, but I think that promoting Mastodon seemed to make sense while Twitter was a dominant platform, in the scope of wither anarchy (a). Eugen Rochko has actually always made it very clear that Mastodon was a clone of his good old times on 2012 Twitter (which may be enough to explain his opposition to quote posts, which have appeared around 2015 maybe?) (b).

The first hypothesis would have implied a liberal, modular approach to features, whereas the historical, publicly documented reality of the CEO's intents explains his conservative approach.

From this point of view he would have been completely transparent from the beginning but Twitter survivors would have been desperately looking for an alternative for a solid decade, whereas today the #100DaysToOffload challenge is just there.

Denote wasn't a thing in 2016 and Guix was only two years old; Skribilo and Haunt didn't exist; the XMPP protocol had no decent Android client and underperforming E2EE. IMHO, Mastodon isn't as relevant today as it was 8 years ago, whereas the GNU project is more mature and consistent in many ways (not "public launch" mature yet, if this even makes sense from me, but there's a tight community around it, in a post-Canonical era).

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Jon @jdp23@blahaj.zone

1y

I always appreciate your perspectives, no need to apologize! Very much agreed about Eugen's focus on Mastodon as a Twitter alternative. Unfortunately that's not what it's good at. The Glitch and Hometown forks are pretty decent as a basis for networked communities, so he could have embraced that ... but no. I wrote about this in A tale of two prototypes There are certainly a lot of other options out there and Mastodon certainly isn't a leader these days.

But I think racism in the Fediverse a big problem in its own right -- Mastodon gets the most attention but it's a general problem. It's likely to be a big issue for any social network that starts primarily with white techies, but still, there are ways to make progress ... I don't know enough about the GNU projeect to know how well they address that.

@oceane @ErickaSimone

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Océane @oceane@peculiar.florist

1y

@ErickaSimone @jdp23 The only Black person I can think of in the #GNU project looks isolated from my point of view; his always excellent messages on the XMPP seldom get replies; but addressing it is less likely to trigger a trauma response from 70% of the white community members because unlike Mastodon, its software doesn't predate on child abuse survivors and structurally improductive (disabled, isolated, mediocre at school, jobless…) people.

It's still a mostly white, colorblind movement but I don't expect active resistance (in the form of fight/flight/freeze/please coping mechanisms) to e.g. an antiracist working group. To my knowledge no antiracist effort has gained significative traction but a motivated enough white person with enough free time could try and spin up something.

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