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Comment on Blacksky Is Nothing Like Black Twitter—and It Doesn’t Need to Be

Kichae@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

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.

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Buelldozer@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
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 experience is so different from other peoples.

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- JCPhoenix@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  Same. And I am a racial minority (though not black, so that may color things…excuse the unintentional pun). That said, on Mastodon, I almost 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.
  
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  - Buelldozer@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    YouTube…that reminds of a conversation I had here on Lemmy a few months. 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, and probably other Social Media algorithms, don’t do a good job of classifying political content as to its lean. So once you start engaging with political content of any kind the algorithm starts suggesting all kinds of it.
    
    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 and that’s the best idea I’ve come up with.
    
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    MrShankles@reddthat.com ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    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
    
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    JCPhoenix@beehaw.org ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    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.
    
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- Kichae@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  
  Like you I’m confused at the continual cries of racism on Mastadon.
  
  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.
  
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  - Buelldozer@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    I apologize for misreading your post.
    
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FarceOfWill@infosec.pub ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
There was definitely a problem at first 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.

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teawrecks@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
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.

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- SweetCitrusBuzz@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - teawrecks@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    
    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.
    
    I agree with this part, “in many cases” sure,
    
    That’s the primary issue here.
    
    …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.
    
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