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Blacksky Is Nothing Like Black Twitter—and It Doesn’t Need to Be
(www.wired.com)
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this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2024
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Technology
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and full of racists/white supremacists (still is).
I don't see them there.
Best thing about Mastodon is no insidious algorithm forcing stuff on you to specifically make you angry.
Well, they exist. Probably because a lot of the harrasment goes on in DMs or in followers only posts (or instances block them or they do dogwhistles etc).
Yes, but people are, regardless, still awful and so it's not a place me or many others would recommend precisely because not many care enough to do anything about it. Which is exactly why I try to.
Yeah. It's pretty telling that my entire time on Mastodon has been punctuated by black users complaining about how much racism they're exposed to on the network, and everyone else going "I don't see any racism!"
Like, ok, maybe you don't. I don't. I'm as white as snow, and don't post about my experiences as a racialized person (not being one, and all). But it's pretty clear, just from seeing the same exchange over and over again, that racialized people are experiencing something I'm not, and them expressing as much has Defenders of the Faith circling wagons every time it comes up.
Mastodon being a little more complicated than Twitter wouldn't have been a major blocker to communities coming over. "Hey, join this site", rather than "join Mastodon!" is all you need. But no one's going to be telling black folks, or any other community, to come on over if the social atmosphere is at least as toxic as where they're coming from.
Now with another alternative, Mastodon also needs to be better than "not being Twitter". And the people who are there already seem to have zero interest in doing that.
I don't use Mastodon so I have no idea what's going on, but I am curious what y'all in this thread would want Mastodon to do.
Can't you set up an instance and moderate it to your preference like other federation style apps?
What specific features are you saying are needed to make Mastodon more usable for any community that might find itself feeling less than welcome?
People have had standing requests, and even PRs, for features for years. Many of them are for exact kinds of things Bluesky has implemented. Some have been for similar features but at the server level.
The requests have gone unheard, the PRs have been ignored. So, what I'd have Mastodon do is listen to those requesting better self-safety features, or hurry up and die so development team that actually gives a shit can gain some traction.
I mean tools help somewhat but really the solution is on a social level, for people to start giving a shit.
Can you point me at them? Which ones?
Like you I'm confused at the continual cries of racism on Mastadon. I've been on there for months and never seen it. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist but I'm confused as to how it is "full of racists/white supremacists" but I never bump into them or see it.
I don't want to doubt anyone's experience but I'm at a loss to explain why my feed is so different from other peoples.
Same. And I am a racial minority (though not black, so that may color things...excuse the unintentional pun). That said, on Mastodon, I mainly interact with the people on my instance. And it's small. There's probably only a core group of like 50 active individuals, and I'm one of them. So there I'm not surprised I don't see racism.
Interestingly, I have the same experience on even the proprietary social media sites. I was on Twitter from 2009 to 2023. I can't say I was ever served up far-right content by the algorithms. I'm still on YouTube; same experience. Same on Instagram. Same on Bluesky.
I'm not trying to discount other people's experiences, and I've seen the horrible tweets referenced in news articles and reddit comments and such. So I know it exists, but why am I not being served this content, while so many others apparently are? I mean, I'm OK with not getting far right wing content, lol. Leave me out of it! Makes my online life easier and more enjoyable. But it's just odd.
YouTube...that reminds of a conversation I had here on Lemmy a while back. The subject of right wing political content on YouTube came up and I had the same "I don't encounter that" comment that I just made in regards to Mastadon.
After a bit of back and forth I realized that I don't engage with political content of any type on YT so the algorithm doesn't push it at me. It seems that YT doesn't do a good job of classifying political content as to its lean. So once you start engaging with political content the algorithm starts suggesting all kinds of it.
It's the same with social justice and racial issues. I don't engage with that kind of content on YT or Mastadon, don't see it my feeds, and it's not being pushed at me by the algorithm.
I don't know if that explains it completely but there has to be some reason(s) why some of us don't see this stuff while other people see it all the time.
I've recently used YT more than I ever have in the past... and was surprised at some of the suggested content at first (like, why tf would you think I'm interested in that‽). And it was weird being able to almost "see" the algorithm and what it was trying to decipher about me (to offer more personally-relevant content of course!)
I started getting suggestions for click-bait shit at first, and if it got me for even a moment ('I wanna see what this is about'), the suggestions became even more brain-dead and polarized.
I had to actively choose to cut my curiosity off while mindlessly perusing... because apparently, if I want to watch bull-riding, that immediately means I want to see rage-bait bullshit about power-dynamics and diviciveness. It was a bit much, seeing in real-time how someone might be casually walked into an echo-chamber of self fulfilled crazy.
So I did end up encountering the surface layer of it, but now it's sliding back into my hobby-areas of interests. But it still pops shit up with AI generated images for videos (that never actually occurs in the video) with click-bait titles, and is inherently only used to induce "doom-scrolling" while increasing engagement. It's fucking disgusting, to put it bluntly.
I just wanna see how different drywall anchors work sometimes, I don't need to know how a "Navy Seal pwned a police officer that pulled them over (AI picture of a dude body slamming a cop)". Dumb shit
Ah fair point. Yeah, I rarely look at political content on YouTube, Instagram, and even Bluesky. Mainly because I use my real name on these platforms.
I reserve that for reddit, Lemmy, Tildes, and Mastodon, where I use screennames. And Mastodon doesn't have an algorithm.
On Twitter, I did engage in political content, even with my real name, but I largely stopped using Twitter daily years ago. I went from tweeting regularly, to only lurking, and just maybe once or twice a week at that. By the end, I was checking maybe once a month. The Twitter algorithm probably didn't have enough info on me, given my weak activity levels.
I, uh, said I'm not confused by the cries of racism. I'm confused by the constant claims of "I don't see any, therefore it must not exist".
It's like no one gives a shit, because it doesn't affect them personally. Which, you know, makes everyone the kind of people that those experiencing harassment don't want to be around anyway.
I apologize for misreading your post.
There was definitely a problem at first (when musk bought twitter) on mastodon with people buying a server instance for the black community, and then not actually blocking all the standard bad servers.
Basically giving them a server full of targets to harass.
I guess you could say setting up an instance and maintaining a blue sky block list is sort of similar, you're taking it on yourself to see all the horrible stuff, even seeking it out, to protect others.
The blue sky approach lets people use multiple Blocklists though and masto just has the one of the server you're on and your personal one. Lots of room for improvement.
Comparing the "racism" present on a federated service to that on a centralized one doesn't make sense. You can say certain instances of the service fail to adequately moderate racism, but there are so many niche pockets of mastodon that most people are exposed to, and moderated by, completely different groups.
To make a slightly more nerdy analogy, it's like someone saying "the windows desktop experience is better than Linux". Well Linux doesn't come with a desktop interface, so that statement doesn't make sense. Which of the dozens of windowers/distros are you talking about? I'm sure the criticism is fair, but it doesn't contain enough information to make any real claim.
So it's not unreasonable for one person to say "I see racism on Mastodon" and many others to say "I never see it", and not just because of the races of the people involved. "Mastodon" refers to a protocol, not the various ecosystems that use it.
The problem in many cases isn't that they don't literally see it but that they aren't aware of what constitutes racism a lot of the time. That's the primary issue here. That and they don't listen to those that have to endure the harrasment, or don't believe them.
How can Mastodon fix this? How is this a Mastodon issue vs. any kind of social media?
Mastodon is open source, as well, right? It feels like someone should be able to fork it if they're really ignoring useful features that would help people.
Yeah it's not a mastodon issue any more than racist speech is an issue with our ability to vocalize as humans.
Similarly, the solution to people saying racist things isn't for all speech to be policed by a central authority, it's for societies themselves to learn to identify and reject racism.
I am glad you asked. Whilst it is primarily a social issue, the lack of good moderation tools tie into it.
The main developer behind mastodon is well known for not giving a shit about moderation and has attacked those who actually do good moderation before both in words and by making the moderation tools confusing and in some uses useless for users and admins alike.
The flagship instance of mastodon proves this as it is still not behind any kind of verification when you try to sign up to it meaning spam bots and the worst people can openly sign up which is something instances and people who care about moderation don't allow as checking users aren't nefarious is a good first step.
It's also got many many users on it which is likely intentional as a lot of social media creators both commercial and non commercial think it is a numbers game and that is all that matters rather creating something sustainable and pleasant.
This had a knock-on effect in that many of the tools he created for moderation he changed, such as making the reporting tools for users have one reporting like "I don't like this" or something effectively go in to the bin, never seen by admins or moderators because he in part runs one if the biggest mostly unchecked/not well moderated instances and so instead of moderating well wanted to do less work in moderating which big fucking red flag there that your instance is too big and you aren't really concerned with moderation.
Not caring about moderation means that other instance admins and users have to do your work for you whilst you can gleefully ignore all the problems you cause, especially if you also develop the code and don't give users or admins the tools they need or keep making changes to make it less and less something unique and to be cherished and more and more corporate which is exactly what it seemed like he wanted in the first place, for it to be twitter but with a bit more care though lessening that as time went on.
So whilst it is a social issue, tools and the way the technology is thought about and the way the technology is presented to users and admins alike helps as does listening to what is useful and what is not.
That is what mastodon could do: give a shit and stop messing with moderation tools whilst developing better ones and listening to users and admins, especially the most vulnerable or those who care about what is needed.
P.S. Oh and he also removed one of the timelines from the mobile app he developed for using mastodon because on his instance it was a mess and so thought it was useless because he refused to do good moderation, I think that says a lot as well.
I agree with this part, "in many cases" sure,
...but I think this a strong claim to make unless you have data to back it up.
I believe you and I are likely speaking from our own anecdotal experience on the platform, and for all we know, most people are in instance bubbles and are also speaking from their own perspectives.
If the "primary issue" is "why do some people not report seeing racism?" and the two possible explanations are either "they see it but are not aware" and "they actually never see it", then unless we have accurate data from all those bubbles, we can't make any claims about which is the real explanation.
But if you have data on this, that would change everything.
Bluesky also has no algorithm in its "followed" feed. Any algorithm is opt-in.
Do you think this is a systemic problem, or just the happenstance of today? Is there something about Bluesky's architecture or governance that makes it more resilient against that (particularly in the long term)? Or will they have all the same problems as they gain more users and enable more federation with other servers?
I mean, it is a systemic problem in that society is racist, social media reflects that. It could be the one to change that in part if people cared enough to fix things both online and off. But they don't, they're so dedicated to upholding the structures of white supremacy and remaining willfully ignorant that they end up caring just about themselves.
Having said that, whilst Bluesky may or may not care about moderation on a global level (I've heard mixed things), I think this kind of community building and user level block lists is a good thing, so it may work out for now.
Like all commercial ventures into anything online I do expect it'll become enshitified eventually, but for now may it long continue and hopefully drive the devs, moderators and actual users of the fediverse to care and introduce better moderation features or actually care about doing it and stopping the many white supremacists etc on the network through various means.
Thanks for the info. I was not aware that Bluesky had public, shareable block lists. That is indeed a great feature.
For anyone else like me who was not aware, I found this site with an index of a lot of public block lists: https://blueskydirectory.com/lists . I was not able to load some of them, but others did load successfully. Maybe some were deleted or are not public? I'm not sure.
I've never been heavily invested in microblogging, so my first-hand experience is limited and mostly academic. I have accounts on Mastodon and Bluesky, though. I would not have realized this feature was available in Bluesky if you hadn't mentioned it and I didn't find that index site in a web search. It doesn't seem easily discoverable within Bluesky's own UI.
Edit: I agree, of course, that there is a larger systemic problem at the society level. I recently read this excellent piece (very long but worth it!) that talks a bit about how that relates to social media: https://www.wrecka.ge/against-the-dark-forest/ . Here's a relevant excerpt:
I mean the fundamental problem is that humans are dicks and moderation is always needed. It should also be paid, and supported with counciling and recovery time when needed. Dealing with toxic content is a job.
Federation isn't very good at this. The tech is great but everyone is a volunteer and there's (afaik) no global ban hammer so trolls move from one instance to another. Bluesky currently has venture capital to pay for moderation teams, and centralized ban options.
I don't know how long this can last without advertising revenue though.
Though I'm not human, I've been part of many unpaid moderation teams and I agree. It should be paid and with breaks etc.
Something which not afforded us when we tried to ask or push for it many times sadly and so it goes with moderation, people just don't care enough to pay us a lot of the time as we, can only get paid if those using the service pay the mods or those in charge of it do. However, many don't, won't or can't. To be clear though this isn't just on federated services, this was also on commercial services too.
Thankfully the instances we are on people do support the mods, from what we are aware, but still, a lot more could be done if people could do these things, fairly though not everyone can due to being poor, but some do help out.
We don't agree with your assertion that humans (and probably others) are inherently dicks, but they can certainly display horrible behaviour, yeah.