brainwane | Mastodon and the Fediverse, whiteness and the content notes conversation, etc. (Reply)

(Please don't share/link to this post super widely as I'm still feeling out how I think about this)

As of this month I'm not posting much to Twitter anymore. I used to post the same stuff on Twitter and on another microblogging platform called Mastodon, and now I'm really just posting on my Mastodon account. I wrote a post about Mastodon and the Fediverse, why I chose the instance I'm on, and why if you're on Mastodon.social you may want to treat that like the general "lobby" that America On-Line chat threw users into when they first joined. A place to start, and then move on from.

Then, today, someone I know asked for context on current conversations happening around whiteness and Mastodon/the Fediverse. Here's what I said (and for right now I'd like folks to not share this post super widely as I'm still feeling out how I think about this):

If you want to read individual posts and threads about it, check out CreatrixTiara who has been boosting a lot of conversation about this stuff, and check out the #BlackMastodon hashtag.

So, there are lively and continuing conversations on Twitter centering Black people in particular -- #BlackTwitter is a group practice and a phenomenon that has its own culture and etiquette and that has given rise to lots of conversation, insights, hashtags and other practices that have been reused, enjoyed, and sometimes appropriated by Twitter, social media, and culture more broadly.

I don't know as much about the Twitter circles of other marginalized groups but I know Black Twitter in particular has been studied by scholars and so on.

The Fediverse (Mastodon instances and other conversation/social media platforms using open standards to interact) has quite a lot of white people, and includes BIPOC folks and have for a long time, and has been partially architected and built by -- in particular -- trans and queer people. And it has certain built-in affordances/constraints (such as the federated model), and also some cultural practices (such as frequent use of "content warning" subject lines on posts, often warning people about things like "uspol" for US politics, or "ec" for "eye contact").

On Mastodon, if someone puts a CW on a post, then a user reading it has to tap/click to expand the post past the CW, and any graphics or video shared in the post is automatically marked "Sensitive media" and the user has to tap/click to display it.

Some of the conversation about the culture of CWs is pretty similar to antiracist conversation more generally about whether we should content-warn differently for outsiders than for insiders about things like sharing our experiences of racism. An argument goes: a Black user might owe other Black users a warning so they don't have to deal with trauma about it unwarned, but does not owe white users a CW because they should not be able to avoid it and thus cherry-pick what parts of a user's feed they enjoy and experience.

Some more dimensions:

people of all backgrounds coming from Twitter to the Fediverse, including people used to Twitter chafing at "CW culture" and at being asked/told to CW things
people who have been in the Fediverse for a while, who find sanctuary in it, chafing at new users who want to bring with them practices that bother or threaten these already-here users
neurodiversity and other intersectional reasons why people might particularly find CWs wonderful, soothing, hard to manage, a barrier, etc.
federation: What etiquette should apply across all Fediverse conversations? What etiquette should be encouraged or enforced within a particular instance? What level of workload is it reasonable to ask moderators (probably volunteers) on a general-purpose instance to do? How much work does it take to start, run, and sustain an instance? Under what circumstances should the users and governance of an instance do some extra work to fulfill the access or moderation needs of a subset of users, and under what circumstances is it reasonable to say "what you want is an experience that is best guaranteed if you and people who want the same thing run an instance dedicated to that kind of experience"? Under what circumstances should one user manage their experience by muting or blocking another, and under what circumstances should they reasonably expect the administrators of their own or another instance to suspend or ban a user, or to partially defederate from another instance, or completely block all communication with it?

I have been on Mastodon since 2017, and on Dreamwidth since before that, so I am used to using CWs or the "cut" functionality on Dreamwidth as a few different things:

a content note/trigger warning, pretty expansively defined ... I don't find it triggering to talk about Twitter, or tech jobs that are hiring, but I'm sure there are people who don't want news about those things, so I mention them in a CW as a courtesy so others can avoid
a subject line
a short description of the longer post, so that people who don't want to read something long can skip it and so it makes their feed less visually cluttered

I've read some people arguing that CWs should ONLY be used for trigger warnings and not as subject lines, since dilution reduces the warning aspect of CWs. Some people occasionally use the text of a CW as the setup to a joke and then the user clicks through to read the punchline, and I've read similar criticism of that practice as well.

I've seen people ask whether Black Lives Matter could have gotten off the ground in a world with CWs on tweets. Sort of drawing on the murder of Emmett Till as an example, maybe? That making white populations look at atrocities is important to inciting change. I think if one is going to make that argument then one has to basically say "Movements like BLM need the wide reach of un-CW'd social media, and that is worth the collateral damage of traumatizing audiences, some of whom are marginalized people forced to re-experience a trauma that is in no way edifying for them." And movement organizers are free to make that argument -- by analogy, we support workers' strikes even when they cause collateral inconvenience or even harm to travellers, students, etc., some of whom are marginalized. Because we believe it's worth the tradeoff, and perhaps because we say "well, this is a defensive action and would not be necessary except for attacks by the aggressor, so they are the ones to blame really".

A white friend asked about how to support BIPOC movements and movement organizers who are already in the Fediverse and who are moving from Twitter to the Fediverse: "how to support/get out of the way as necessary."

I said: I think one way to support would be to donate money or volunteer admin time to Mastodon instances or other Fediverse projects run by BIPOC folks, but I do not yet know of specific instances or initiatives that would fit that description.

Another is to learn, for yourself, what tools are available in the Fediverse. Mastodon has various features and user options (filtering, muting including time-limited muting, lists, turning off the boosts of someone you follow, etc.), and volunteers have built third-party services like Guppe Groups that try to make connection, discovery, filtering/blocking, etc. easier. And instance administrators have certain configuration options, such as defederating from specific instances, and increasing or decreasing the 500-character limit on posts. And the "local-only posting" option in Hometown (a variant of Mastodon) makes it possible to have conversations only visible to the other people on your instance -- like a Slack or Discord channel only for people who have signed up for the same Code of Conduct, etc. as you.

The more you know about what's already possible with the tools available, the more you can control your own experience, help your friends do the same in a way that addresses competing access needs, and (to yourself) call bullshit on anyone who's inaccurately saying "X is impossible in the Fediverse" or "Everyone can solve this problem by doing Y in their own user preferences".

(Please don't share/link to this post super widely as I'm still feeling out how I think about this)