lumpen 🍉 III (@scrum)

@jdp23 @bgrinter @danilo @u2764

i hope this isn't rude of me to butt in here, just a few things i think should be said

@blogdiva i appreciate you saying this, as this overemphasis on "safety" does rub me the wrong way, the narrative of "safety" is one of the main justifications for the ongoing genocide of Palestinians and state repression of protests against Israel. It is at the very least paternalistic and assumes the marginalized are helpless victims incapable of defending themselves.

It also doesn't really explain the issues @mekkaokereke brings up about why there are so few black women etc. on here, not denying racism is a huge factor, but the thing is black women aren't "safe" on twitter or facebook either, but they're still there because that's where people they want to talk to are and conversations they want to be a part of are happening, and they've developed networks and methods of solidarity despite often openly racist moderation policies. Let's also ask why there are so few Latine people on here; a 3rd of the US population and most of the Western Hemisphere.

My partner is Afro-Latina I encourage her to post on here more, but she's often told me "Fedi is full of professionals, everyone is a Coder with a career, i feel intimidated / can't relate to people on there" and I think many people have that impression. There just isn't much for a general audience to enjoy, so why go through the work of finding an instance and investing time in a platform that doesn't even try to appeal to you? I think BluesSky is aware of this obvious fact that so rarely gets brought up at all in this discussion on fedi.

personally i'm neither trans nor a furry, nor a software engineer, but i'm anarchish which is the 1 other big niche lol, there's so little consideration for people who are outside of these niches that sysadmins and devs are interested in it's just mind boggling.

Another big part of it is the artificially limited design of Mastodon, it imitates twitter arbitrarily, when the celebrity centered outrage algorythm is central to twitters design, and so as far as twitter clones go, bloosky is always going to win. Why isn't there a video or music tab that auto indexes media that's shared to the feeds? software wise this can be done with regex and SQL easily. Why isn't "fetch all replies" internal to Mastodon? Mastodon doesn't even have Markdown! Groups would make things more fun and finding friends easier, many platforms already but Mastodon doesn't have it because website boy said no, and he's dictator for life. Hard Fork Now.

Please do not interpret this as me downplaying the need for effective moderation, but it's not the only thing, every other social media platform also has endemic racism/homophobia/harassment, but people need to get something out of the platform that outweighs the drawbacks and fedi doesn't have this for a lot of people.