Last major update: December 3. See the update log below for details.
DRAFT! Feedback welcome!
I’ve shared the draft on@inquiline@mastodon.social on Mastodon Then again, whiteness resists change. As Are0h says
“It’s culture. And whiteness, as Du Bois identified years ago, is committed to fighting to assert itself in yet another new space.”
Unfortunately a lot of the dynamics of the Twitter exodus risk reinforcing power inequities and racial disparities on Mastodon in the broader fediverse. One obvious factor is the high-profile examples of harassment of people of color (especially women and non-binary people), combined with so many white people talking about how much better they like Mastodon and giving less-than-helpful advice to POC. The failure of many instances to block sites that are well-known for shitposting and harassment makes the problem worse. And even after mistakes have been admitted, and promises made to do better, the high-profile suspensions of women of color on flagship instances run by Rochko (including Tracy Chou, creator of Block Party!) also send a signal to POC that maybe Mastodon isn’t the place for them.
And those issues are just the tip of the iceberg.
- How many of the journalists looking at Mastodon as an alternative are even talking about the racial and gender disparities and the long history of marginalization?
- How many instances recommendations of who to follow are mostly white and mostly male?
- While community-contributed tools like fedifinder.glitch.me, Debirdify, and Movetodon that let people find folks they know from Twitter on Mastodon are extremely helpful, bulk-importing contacts risks magnifying racial and gender disparities. White people are mostly following other white people, and research on other platforms show that white people are more likely to amplify white people, so one likely outcome is steadily-increasing disparities.
- And of course there’s the longstanding issue of white users telling people of color to put content warnings on discussions about race. As Flowers says:
“Insofar as instances inherit whiteness, the content warning conversation, at least in my view, is an argument over whether or not Mastodon should continue to maintain its inheritance of whiteness because as Ahmed says, “One of the challenges for white people is rejecting this inheritance.””
And it’s not just whiteness; the same’s true for cis-normativity and ablism. So maybe Mastodon and the Fediverse as a whole won’t evolve. We shall see.
More positively, though, new instances like blacktwitter.io and dair-community.social are having an impact. Black Aziz Ananzi’s #BlackFriday #BlackMastodon #BlackJoy hashtag activism is extremely encouraging. Project Mushroom foregrounds justice, and has paid moderators. So whether or not Mastodon evolves, the most exciting potential path forward is for sites with anti-oppressive values to form a loose coalition – an extended version of the “alliance” that toot.cat admins discussed back in 2017 – with relatively-strong connections internally and much more limited connections to the broad fediverse.
If white-led sites are willing to follow the lead of sites with BIPOC leadership, and there’s funding for diverse BIPOC-led teams to drive improvements to Mastodon and/or new decentralized software platforms (as well as moderation; Costanza-Chock and Kazemi have both proposed moderation collectives), that could lead to a great outcome.
However it plays out, an honest look at Mastodon’s history is vital for acknowledging, correcting, and making reparations for past harms – and understanding how to do better going forward. So let’s close with one more quote from back in the day that’s still remarkably relevent.
“As it stands, Mastodon is not well-equipped for serving disparate communities’ needs. There is but one version of the software, with no established means of extension; there are no advocacy positions or research projects by which communities can make themselves known; the development pipeline seems hardly attentive to or even aware of the specific communities which its product serves. These are all things which will have to change for the project to be able to accommodate anything more than its loudest majority.”
– Allie Hart, Mourning Mastodon, April 2017
Update log
- ongoing: minor fixes and additions in response to feedback and as I discover new links
- December 1: add new section on Mastodon and the Fediverse, and per-year section headings
- December 3-4: add new sections on ActivityPub, Playvicious.social, and accessibility; rework the View from 2022 section
- January 14 2023: add link to Mastodon WTF timeline
- June 28 2023: changes to the Does Mastodon really prioritize stopping harassment? section
Notes
* rot13.com is a handy ROT13 decoder
** additional implmentation in December fixed some important loopholes related to boosting and replies. Darius Kazemi’s Hometown page on local-only posting traces further evolution of this functionality.
This feature is based on the work of Renato Lond, which is itself based on a feature in the Mastodon Glitch Edition fork. Third party application interactions were redesigned based on the suggestions of @lostfictions. The idea for an emoji triggering a local post comes from Mastodon Glitch Edition, and the idea for it to be a custom emoji called
local_onlycomes from @t54r4n1@mspsocial.net.*** The ActivityPub standardization process was challenging; in A better moderation system is possible for the social web, Erin Shepherd describes it as “4 years going around in circles arguing with each other about minor details” and “a working group divided” that “produced two families of incompatible social networking protocols.” Christine Lemmer-Webber’s On standards divisions and collaboration and the Standards for the Social Web section in Amy Guy’s On standards divisions and collaboration have more on the dynamics.
Thanks to:
- Everybody who gave feedback on earlier versions. Some people specifically asked not to be credited by name, so I’m not listing specific folks yet … but I greatly appreciate all of your feedback!
- Are0h, elizabeth veldon, christina d’ache, and everybody else who gave me permission to quote their Mastodon posts
- revenant dyke for help with the timeline on initial implementation of local-only posts, and Artist Marcia X and Ginny for clarifying the origin of #FediBlock.
- all the community members and journalists who wrote and spoke about these issues over the years
- the admins and moderators on toot.cat, wandering.shop, and scholar.social for all the work over the years to create good online homes
- most of all, the volunteers who helped create something that while very imperfect is still pretty amazing.
Image Credit: Photo by Credit Score Geek via Flickr, licensed under CC BY 2.0.
