This is an important PSA for folks looking to make any place more inclusive. Do you want to be liked by everyone? Or do you want to make progress?
I don't know anyone that has both been successful in transforming a non-inclusive place, and hasn't been accused of sounding hostile.
It takes a huge amount of energy to dance on eggshells, and I don't have time to do it. So I don't. I'm a big boy. I crack sidewalks when I walk. So eggshells would have no chance anyway. 🤷🏿♂️
If you try to say that Mastodon can't afford to be more inclusive, or that it's not important for Mastodon to accommodate all the folk leaving Twitter, I'm going to disagree with that, and point out that those talking points echo unapologetically anti-Black talking points.
If you view this as hostile, I can't help you with that.
Let me be clear on what is going to happen:
Mastodon is going to become a better place for Black users.
Mastodon is going to become easier to admin for small orgs
Small suggestion, people who have fled real world conflict zones or environmental disasters, and their supporters, have asked if posters can avoid use of term "refugees" for people leaving Twitter.
@mekkaokereke@Kay I get called “hostile” when I ask people to stop calling themselves “Twitter refugees.” I also get told that they’re traumatised by leaving Twitter, much in the same way Syrian children are traumatised when they’re forced to leave their homes. 😑
With the right perspective, the same exact behavior perceived as hostile by some, is seen as super helpful by others.
I said "Twitter refugees" in the above post. I would have gone on still saying it in future posts, oblivious to the fact that my words are unintentionally hurtful to some of my friends.
Kay let me know that my words might be perceived very differently than I intend.
This doesn't mean I always change my words! As I said my goal is not to please everyone all of the time. It's to not be misunderstood, or unintentionally hurtful as I make progress.
Eg some people are upset by the fact that I capitalize the word Black. I sometimes get this feedback. I don't change it. I'm not being misunderstood by capitalizing the word Black.
Some people are upset when I point out systemic racism. I don't stop pointing it out. I'm not being misunderstood.
@mekkaokereke@InayaShujaat@Kay I love that framing. Changing is appropriate to fix misunderstandings, but not fundamental disagreement. If you’re true to your own ethics, it is good to be both liked and disliked for accurate reasons.
I’m socialized as a white woman, so the “please like me” and “everybody should get along” training is deep and strong. This is such a helpful metric to counteract that.
My mother, a US Naval officer, taught me this quote from Admiral Zumwalt: "I have a long list of friends and a long list of enemies, and I'm proud of both."
That doesn't mean I should make enemies when I don't need to, but if I do, I should be intentional about it.
I also appreciate the framing above, and I appreciate feedback that I can choose to incorporate or not.
@mekkaokereke@InayaShujaat@Kay I say “Twitter survivors” when it's appropriate, but indeed, “Twitter refugees” has always bothered me for this very reason.
@oceane@mekkaokereke@InayaShujaat@Kay I used to refer to myself as a "Birdsite Exile", but with the assumption that this could only be read ironically. Then I discovered many #Twitter users were full-on lotus eaters, and the gag stopped being funny.
@oceane@mekkaokereke@InayaShujaat@Kay thanks, as a childhood sexual abuse survivor, this gives me experiential empathy about why “refugee” is problematic. My inner monologue just went “survivor?! did they have uncontrollable panic attacks due to intrusive thoughts about it? Did they require years of therapy in order to be a functional human being afterwards?” and I had to tell it to calm the fuck down and not compare trauma.
@mekkaokereke@karenbynight@Kay@oceane This is exactly why words matter. People need to think about the impact it has on those who have actually lived through real trauma. To use words like “refugee” and “survivor,” it DOES diminish the experiences of actual refugees and survivors of trauma.
I doubt anyone suffers from PTSD just because they left Twittter.
@InayaShujaat@mekkaokereke@karenbynight@Kay Sorry, I'm not talking about PSTD from leaving Twitter, I have no experience or competence about it 😅 I'm talking about the trauma of having been through a long-running scam, for several years, which feels like abuse, IMHO. I believe that whenever there's abuse we can also see a scam lasting months or years, it's usually tied, directly or not, to money (how many beaten children would leave their parents if it wasn't for the rent and for the food?).
That's at least my experience with the French school system, Twitter, and a domestic abuser, Kevin, who was honestly 80% as harmful to me as Twitter. Talking about auditive hallucinations with Kevin, but not that bad.
@InayaShujaat@mekkaokereke@karenbynight@Kay Honestly, given how long Twitter has impacted me (8 years), 60%, and that's purely to sound reasonable. I just repeated for the first time when I've housed Kevin, but I'm not even talking about spending a single white night with him, coping with him because he would prevent me from giving an assignment!
But if we isolated both and compared 3 months with Kevin to 3 months being addicted to Twitter, yeah, 80%.
I'm still not, in any way, talking about the use of the word “refugees” – I'm not competent enough on the topic and I'm not comparing anything to it! But I think considering some collective behaviors on Twitter as how abuse victims are communicating could shed some light on phenomenons that are stigmatized in France and, I guess, in the US too – so-called “cancel culture”, “online hate”, etc. I'm not defending in any way the use of the word “refugees” in the context of people coming on the fedi from any platform.
@oceane@InayaShujaat@mekkaokereke@Kay I think one of the problems here is the implication of collective nouns. In bristling a bit at the term survivor as applied to Twitter, I do not intend to invalidate your experience or question your trauma. It sounds like we would have a lot of commonalities on that front. But I don’t think your experience is necessarily typical of most twitter-leavers, while my experience of trauma has much in common with other survivors of abuse (likely including you).
As a white person (for whatever that may be worth), I actually kinda like this new custom of capitalizing "Black" because it lets me signal unobtrustively that I'm trying to be inclusive, even if I sometimes mess up.
Relatedly: a right-wing relative recently passed me an editorial from the UK arguing that capitalizing "Black" is doing it wrong, US political issues are being imposed on the rest of the world, yadda yadda... and I'm, like, yeah, I see what you're doing there. Not buying it.
@mekkaokereke@Kay I’m seen as hostile because I’m Muslim. I use the exact same words as folks like Kay, but because they’re not Muslim, they’re perceived as being helpful.
I’m sick of the anti-Muslim bias that’s all across the fediverse.
@InayaShujaat@Kay Thanks for sharing this. ❤️ This is a perspective that never clicked for me before this. I've probably used that term in the past, ignorant to how it downplays what others have gone through.
I've stopped saying "I've got PTSD from <minor inconvenience>" as well after my coworker's husband was diagnosed with it; I realized me using those words in that way minimized the legitimate trauma he was suffering.
Right now, I'm ignoring everyone saying that the Fediverse can't be better, safer, and more inclusive than it is today, and easier for new non-technical users to onboard, and easier for admins and mods to administer and moderate. And it will be better for app developers.
Eugen and AreOh don't always agree. Folks that work on Chrome, Safari, and Mozilla don't always agree. Folks that build parts of Android and folks that build parts of iOS don't always agree. But they all agree on this.♥️🙏🏿
@mekkaokereke of course it can be better. Sounds like a working group needs to be assembled like they did for the early development of the internet. Get a bunch of smart people together and start. Where you are with what you got.
You can move mountains.
@mekkaokereke It's striking that this is one of the few "fedi is open and therefore you can't stop us from making it safe" takes I've read, but I've seen about a million "fedi is open, therefore you can't stop Meta" takes.
@mekkaokereke On that note, there was a lot of conversation a few weeks ago about configuring default blocklists on new servers. I'm at the point of looking into that for my own server, do you know of any resources detailing the current best practices in that regard? Or even anywhere where the discussion around that is happening?
@mekkaokereke I hear ya. The "It's too hard" narrative is one that I'm personally trying to overcome when my spouse (a white dude in tech) and I talk about these kinds of things. If you've got tips on how to disable that narrative, I'd love some pointers.
@mekkaokereke I agree with you on the friends part. Spouses and families are more difficult. I keep trying, though. And I push the disruption of the narrative whenever I think it will be received.
@mekkaokereke I think I will introduce my friends & family to #Misskey before #Mastodon as the former supports quote posting. Many of them are on #Threads already, which means they will be introduced to the #Fediverse en mass in the near future.
I am not sure why you would assume otherwise when they repeatedly mention #ActivityPub & Fediverse when talking to the media. Their intent is to dominate the future of social media, which is decentralization.
There is also a business case for them to do it as well, which I will type about later on #WriteFreely.
@kikobar@darnell@mekkaokereke FB killed many new media outlets by fabricating data and starting the dreaded "pivot to video" movement. If they lie to their customers, they certainly would have no reason not to lie to the public.
And by federating via ActivityPub, they get data from #Mastodon, #WordPress, #PeerTube, #Kbin, etc. – unless, of course, those ActivityPub-enabled servers choose not to federate.
(Sidenote: Meta can still get that data via RSS, but it’s probably better for them to receive via push request than pull request.)
Most social media companies don’t want to be publishers. They’d rather be platforms. And if you’re building a platform that merely integrates with an already existing social network (the Fediverse), you have all the more reason to say you’re not a publisher.
This way, when those politicians call Zuckerberg down to Washington, and ask him why he’s hampering their freedom of speech, he can just say, “No, we can’t hurt anyone’s freedom of speech – that congressman we kicked out of Threads a month ago can set up a Mastodon server if he wants…”
Of course, I can talk about the many other benefits of not being a publisher but that would take much too long.
@atomicpoet@mekkaokereke@darnell however, this wouldn't be ActivityPub to talk to us... it would be a separate constellation of Fediverse-like sites talking to Meta, not 'our' Fedi at all.
@atomicpoet@mekkaokereke@darnell it actually makes sense for any kind of broadcaster, including celebrities, but only if they run their own Fediverse instances... Interesting...
But here’s the bigger reason Meta doesn’t want to be a publisher: then they’d have to pay news organizations.
However, here’s the rub. You can’t kill Twitter without news. So how do you solve this problem?
You get news organizations to set up their own ActivityPub-enabled servers which then pushes news to #Threads.
Now Meta has plausible deniability because they didn’t publish those originating news posts. The news organizations did. If those news organizations didn’t want to freely send their news to Threads, they shouldn’t have sent their posts to Threads.
It’s the old “if you didn’t want me to read the letter, you shouldn’t have sent it to my inbox.” See what I’m saying?
And of course, what news organization isn’t going to want to reach 70 million people (currently) on Threads? That would be awful for their business.
"We use training data that is supplied by our users and federating servers."
This is the point where I would start poisoning the well.
For example with automated instances that either push biased information (e.g. taking posts about how important fighting climate change is, resending it with a local bot account) or generating adversarial/nonsensical data (and sending that to facebook).
@darnell@kikobar@mekkaokereke they very specifically mention Mastodon when you sign up and see ActivityPub. So there's no doubt, they're extremely clear on their intent.
@shipp please allow me to disagree on this one. It won't be the first time a corporation conveniently changes its mind down the road.
They are for-profit organisations, if something does not make $$ business sense, it won't be sustained.
If we can think of an actual business case, that's another story, that's why I am so keen on what @darnell and @atomicpoet have to share about the business case.
@darnell@kikobar@mekkaokereke The legal risks of them federating are going to be too messy for their lawyers to accept. Generally Mastodon instances don't have users grant any license, much less one to sublicense under FB-friendly terms, to the instance. It's all implicit in user intent and always revokable.
@dalias@darnell@mekkaokereke actually I believe that yes, we grant a de-facto license to store, display and distribute over the Fediverse, but that's all we grant.
There is no license to sell, modify, aggregate, make derivatives or anything else.
We can actually fine-tune our license by inserting it clearly in our profile or in the post itself, making the ability for Meta to exploit it even more painful and potentially expensive. 😉
@kikobar@darnell@mekkaokereke I wouldn't call it license, just that there's evidence of intent and willingness by instances to cease all copying upon request. If they didn't actually honor deletion protocol, things would be a lot different and legal risk would IMO be high.
@dalias fully agree with your definition: 'evidence of intent and willingness', which someone may be able to construct as a limited license... but nowhere near to a Meta-friendly license at all.
@mekkaokereke Honestly people’s position on not wanting “too many” people on Mastodon or even worse, not wanting the open platform that is Mastodon to federate with Threads if the time comes because they view “open platform” as only open when it suites their preferences - smells a lot like HOA’s that kept black folks in mass from quality housing for decades… but sure somehow Threads is going to ruin the fabric of Mastodon, more than those non-inclusive instincts you’re happy to act on🤷🏾♂️
>"Let me be clear on what is going to happen:
> * Mastodon is going to become a better place for Black users.
> * Mastodon is going to become easier to admin for small orgs
@mekkaokereke IIRC, you were on another (Black-oriented?) server a few months ago and were just hammered with hate. I haven't seen you mention that as an issue since you moved to Hachyderm.
Might that experience suggest an onboarding guide for Black folks?
@mekkaokereke really good points here. Something important to most organizations that got on the Bird Site was the blue check, right? It identified them as being "really" that org or person.
On #Mastodon & #Lemmy every org or person has the opportunity to start their own instance and federate with everybody. What higher level of control & verification of their identity & message could there be?
Let's portray the #fediverse correctly: an opportunity for people & orgs to control their identity & message on the #Internet without relying on Zuck, Dorsey, or Musk or any for profit to provide that control. They'll join up in droves.
I'd expect every government, corporation, non profit, & wealthy celebrity to hire a Fediverse ... guy, buy a server, and get federated. Probably cheaper than whatever they're spending on social media people. Smaller groups could band together for the same purpose. The Fediverse offers control in a way these other sites just can't.
@mekkaokereke I reported a sexual harassment incident which occurred at a C++ conference a while back. My story was investigated and found to be credible. Reporting it should have been the hard part.
At a recent event it was made clear that I am a troublemaker for speaking up. Some prominent people refused to talk to me. One person said I should try to have a nice life and stop blaming the perpetrator. Someone said, if I would shut up then everyone else could enjoy the conference.
Yes! There is inherent risk in all advocacy. We're "upsetting the apple cart" if we are trying to make room/demand rights/etc. Mostly because people think they're getting shoved out of the way or act like not doing xyz is some infringement on their rights.
So yeah, if we want to be allies, we need to be willing to be disliked by the kind of people who aren't willing to step back to make the circle wider. ✊
@mekkaokereke Are we at a point that we can’t distinguish a (strong) opinion from a hostile one? Are we still having doubts about racism and privileges? For any marginalized group, though African Americans have to also deal with very systematic disadvantages, I can’t begin to imagine the kind of existential dread you have to deal with. Being perceived as hostile seems like just a minor inconvenience. But then, a couple of your messages that I’ve read, hostile they are certainly not.
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