mastodon and the eternal september

Dr. Jessica F. Hebert · twitter.com/Dame_DNA · 5:35 PM · Nov 10, 2022

Patricia Aas 🐢🏳️‍🌈 · pati_gallardo · Nov 9
Ok fine. I have tried to hold my tongue, but there is a line, and when Mastodon folks threaten BIPOC people with getting blocked for not Content Warning when they talk about racism... I need to get real with y’all.

Cool, so Mastodon is also garbage.

First: I am not just not discounting what Patricia has saying - because it's _true_ - but have boosted her and written in support _over there_. I know people _I have met_ who've seen this.

But Mastodon has been very white and very Usenet, and is now having its Eternal September.

Mastodon was substantially built by women and queers who fled Twitter over harassment - but mostly white people. It's been a very... trauma-aware community, but it's _not_ socially aware of _other_ axes of discrimination, even if it most certainly should be.

The social conventions that seem to have built up involve using "CW" not for "this is NSFW," but also for "this is srs bsns content where many users have trauma."

They've been using CW "birdsite" to talk about _twitter_, for example.

This is interfacing _badly_ with new users.

It's _excellent_ at siloing away fascists, terfs, white supremacists. It uses the n*zi bar phenomenon against them _very_ effectively.

There's a big n*zi mastodon. It's siloed away. There's a blocklist people share. It works, and works well. It's _very_ hard - _very, very hard_ - to launch hate raids on Mastodon. It's even harder to do it twice.

But it's socially bad at _this_.

And this is a _cultural_ interface. It's literally white people being white people and uncomfortable about talking about racism, combined with a big chunk of marginalised people traumatised by their own abuse but not yet able to map that to _other_ marginalised people.

Which gets back to this: there's no "mastodon" that's one massive entity. It's not Twitter or Facebook, not a monolith.

What there are are federations of individual sites, collections which have their own cultures within their own federations.

P*rler is a mastodon fork, part of n*zi mastodon. So is K*w*f*rms. I could relay them.

Obviously, I fucking well don't. But!

Any instance administrator can relay _any_ site that's willing to be relayed, and _anyone_ can be an instance administrator, assuming you have a computer.

There is no central administration outside the individual instance. In that way, it is more Usenet than Usenet was.

And the _largest_ defacto federation - or "fedi" - is very anti-nazi and anti-terf and anti-white-supremacist when it's obvious and anti- a lot of bad things, but again... very white.

And it's having one hell of an argument right now. I know. I'm involved.

I call it "Usenet Twitter," but even that's not very accurate because the social expectations are _so_ different, and it's not just "no algorithm."

Eternal September has arrived, and a lot of them were _not_ ready.

It's gonna be a bumpy ride.