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!

  • Rimu@piefed.socialEnglish
    1·
    3 months ago

    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.
    • The Nexus of Privacy@lemmy.blahaj.zoneOPEnglish
      01·
      3 months ago

      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.

      • Deceptichum@quokk.auEnglish
        1·
        3 months ago

        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.

      • ilovecheese@feddit.ukEnglish
        11·
        3 months ago

        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.