In 4 things white people can do to start making the fediverse less toxic for Black people (DRAFT!) and its cross-posts, quite a few people said things like “maybe racism is a problem on Mastodon, but I don’t see it on Lemmy.” Then again, plenty of comments in the various threads were in fact examples of racism on Lemmy, so one takeaway is that at lot of people don’t see racism even when they’re looking at it. And helpful commenters pointed out some of the other patterns of racism on Lemmy. … but that wasn’t really the thrust of that discussion.
So I wanted to ask more generally, what are some of the examples you’ve seen of racism on Lemmy? Quotes and links are great, but also feel free just to describe examples or call out more general patterns!
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I have seen extremely little racism on Lemmy, but my instance is defederated from those places (.ml, Hexbear etc.) they blocked us themselves so we didn’t even have to do anything. So I definitely dont have the whole picture.
Good point, thanks. It’s great that mods are blocking sources of racism, although also means that people who don’t see can wind up thinking that there isn’t any racism.
It’s great that mods are blocking sources of racism
Or sources of racism are blocking lefties, hah
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If you want to see racism just check the modlog. My favourite feature on Lemmy.
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Their own cross post says white people should post less. Remember, only racism can defeat racism!
Reasons why racism on Lemmy is less of an issue:
- There are only a few Lemmy instances - those that harbor racism are easily defederated from.
- Downvotes make bad content easy to detect, even if not reported.
- Content is posted into communities, which have moderators. Hashtags on Mastodon are un-moderated.
- Unlike mastodon, replies are sent to all instances so visibility is higher. No hiding in obscurity.
- Federated networks tend to have a central hub - Lemmy.world is well moderated, unlike mastodon.social.
These are all good points (and not having anything like Mastodon’s followers-only posts removes another way to hide in obscurity). Moderators certainly got involved in some of the cross-posts of the earlier thread, at least a dozen comments were removed on beehaw and a couple people got banned from the awful.systems thread.
On the other hand, downvoting can also be used as a weapon to try to bury discussions of racism (this thread btw is at -17, the previous one is at -70).
Also somebody here mentions that “There’s currently only 1 user that I’ve noticed that keeps bringing race up.” (hiii!!!). A culture where people don’t talk about race means that whiteness is normalized and unexamined. And quite a few of the comments in this thread (saying I’m the racist, analogizing me to a “Karen”, calling me a fool) and the previous ones (“is this a joke?”, “haha”, “Lol, how is race relevant? Obv rage bait shitpost”, the one analogizing me to Hitler) are all consistent with an environment where reactions to somebody bringing up race are hostile. Almost nobody is challenging these comments, in fact they’ve got plenty of upvotes.
You’ve been asked for evidence multiple times and refuse to supply it.
At this point you’re most likely a right wing troll trying to stir up shit.
Look you’ve been shot down so many times by so many people, but ‘they’re all wrong and I’m right’ is your take away?
I’m beginning to think troll rather than misguided.
I’ll say it loud so those at the back can hear too:
YOU CAN’T FIGHT RACISM WITH MORE RACISM!
It really is quite simple.
Blocking you seems like the best idea in this thread so far.
I find it fascinating that this is down voted.
This is the 8th time some of us have seen this posted.
Also not everyone agrees that this makes sense. Asking people to post, link and comment any all racism even if it’s just a description.
This person seems to think the solution to racism is segregation and making different rules for the races. Also this person only seems to be fixated on black vs white. It’s all very odd.
I wasn’t aware that this has been posted before. I spend way way to much time on Lemmy and I’ve never seen it before, or any post relating to racism on Lemmy. Of course something being posted to many times can be annoying.
I thought the post was interesting because of how much talk there’s been on Mastodon about how exceptionally bad black people’s experiences are on there, and Mastodon is a part of the Fediverse. There are tons of complaints about how white people don’t even see the racism in front of their eyes on Mastodon, claiming there is none (which I, maybe incorrectly, correlated with these here downvotes). Personally I’ve never seen any racism on Mastodon, nor on Lemmy, so if someone is asking for racism to be linked I would find that interesting because I would like to see what I am missing. I could learn from it. All racism isn’t blatant and using slurs that are obvious to people not being targeted.
As you say, all racism isn’t obvious. A quick look at their post history shows 7 or 8 race related posts recently.
Repeatedly stating white people should do or not do specific things.
This seems to me like the definition of racism at it’s roots.
You’re saying OP is a racist?
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I’ve not seen any, but I’m also not subscribed to the kind of communities that would be prone to it. I did still manage to get some transphobia directed at me, which is wild because I’m cis.
That’s the thing with the fediverse, every instance has a slightly different view of the thing as a whole. That’s why picking an instance that aligns with your values matters. You’re not going to see much of that on blahaj or beehaw because those users get banned quickly, and problematic instances are defederated as a whole. The matching opposite instances exist too, some are made to be safe heavens for the extreme right, with all the *ism and *phobias going on there.
I recommend people of color to pick instances that supports them, which in turn means they have admins watching their back and shutting down racism quick.
The fediverse will have every problem that plagues other social medias, and it will be worse because unlike Reddit/Twitter, there isn’t a centralized authority to say no, that’s enough. The only way to deal with it is most big instances saying no and defederating those, but it’ll never go away fully, just hidden away.
I don’t typically see it on here and when I do I report that shit
Facebook, Reddit, and YouTube? Every day, Facebook loves to tell me how it doesn’t violate their rules though.
