The open-source social network gained millions of new users following Twitter’s takeover. While some of its features could improve the quality of public discourse, disadvantaged communities might be excluded.
While some of its features could improve the quality of public discourse, disadvantaged communities might be excluded. […] This is already happening. Some Black users have reported levels of racist abuse unseen on commercial platforms.
That is a steep claim backed up by literally nothing in the article, not even a single link. It might be true, but I find that a bit hard to believe as the Mastodon community specifically has a reputation for being especially protective of minorities.
The later argument that people from poorer countries can not afford to run their own servers is also IMHO misleading. First of all it isn’t that expensive, and secondly efforts by large corps such as Facebook to bribe local ISPs to allow free access to Facebook (and Facebook only) did not improve the situation for these poorer communities, in fact it prevented them from participating on equal footing on the internet as it kept prices for real internet access artificially high in many places.
There was quite a bit of meta-drama on fedi around BIPOC people being told to CW racism. But that’s a far, far cry from “levels of racist abuse unseen on commercial platforms”.
He kinda makes some vague valid criticism, but no real suggestion on how to improve things. And the few things that he does suggest (all black instance) he realized himself are not really a good idea and overall are quite unimaginative of what we could build in the Fediverse together.
And ultimately he seems to fall back to an apologetic stance on Twitter (“not that bad”, “black people can endure that”, “in spite of all the problems”) and a “grass isn’t greener” type of argument based on the fear of losing the network-effect that Twitter offers.
Dunno… I admit that as a white person I cannot fully grasp the “inherent whiteness” of the Fediverse in its full extend, but the argument brought forward in this interview leaves me less than convinced that this is really the main problem. It seems more like he is grasping for arguments for why the “Black Twitter” he got used to and is apologetic about needs to somehow survive the Musk takeover.
Yes, but improve how? The interview tells us more about where the interviewee is on the spectrum of the 7 stages of grief in regards to Twitter than it does about possible ways to make the Fediverse more welcoming for BIPOCs. That it is too “white” can only be fixed by more BIPOCs joining, so that circular logic brings us nowhere.
I think that is very focused in Mastodon. I can assure that, by running a Mastodon server in recent years for 2-3 people very active and connected to a lot of instances is, in fact, very expensive.
There are plenty of Mastodon compatible server software that are less resource intensive, and to be honest most articles I see outlining Mastodon server costs are on some extremely expensive cloud-hosts paying multiples of what they would really need to pay to run the same service.
Yes, complex topic. But I think Masto.host is over-charging massively for bigger instances. My impression is that the person running that service doesn’t actually want to host large instances that would be better off on their own dedicated hardware and thus over-charges them to make them consider moving elsewhere.
That is a steep claim backed up by literally nothing in the article, not even a single link. It might be true, but I find that a bit hard to believe as the Mastodon community specifically has a reputation for being especially protective of minorities.
The later argument that people from poorer countries can not afford to run their own servers is also IMHO misleading. First of all it isn’t that expensive, and secondly efforts by large corps such as Facebook to bribe local ISPs to allow free access to Facebook (and Facebook only) did not improve the situation for these poorer communities, in fact it prevented them from participating on equal footing on the internet as it kept prices for real internet access artificially high in many places.
There was quite a bit of meta-drama on fedi around BIPOC people being told to CW racism. But that’s a far, far cry from “levels of racist abuse unseen on commercial platforms”.
This seems very on-topic and in-depth: https://techpolicy.press/the-whiteness-of-mastodon/
Hmm, that was a long and convoluted read.
He kinda makes some vague valid criticism, but no real suggestion on how to improve things. And the few things that he does suggest (all black instance) he realized himself are not really a good idea and overall are quite unimaginative of what we could build in the Fediverse together.
And ultimately he seems to fall back to an apologetic stance on Twitter (“not that bad”, “black people can endure that”, “in spite of all the problems”) and a “grass isn’t greener” type of argument based on the fear of losing the network-effect that Twitter offers.
Dunno… I admit that as a white person I cannot fully grasp the “inherent whiteness” of the Fediverse in its full extend, but the argument brought forward in this interview leaves me less than convinced that this is really the main problem. It seems more like he is grasping for arguments for why the “Black Twitter” he got used to and is apologetic about needs to somehow survive the Musk takeover.
That, to me, is the crux of it, so I will trust the BIPOC folk when they tell me we need to improve.
Yes, but improve how? The interview tells us more about where the interviewee is on the spectrum of the 7 stages of grief in regards to Twitter than it does about possible ways to make the Fediverse more welcoming for BIPOCs. That it is too “white” can only be fixed by more BIPOCs joining, so that circular logic brings us nowhere.
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I don’t know. But I’ll try to listen to BIPOC folk when they talk about it.
I think that is very focused in Mastodon. I can assure that, by running a Mastodon server in recent years for 2-3 people very active and connected to a lot of instances is, in fact, very expensive.
There are plenty of Mastodon compatible server software that are less resource intensive, and to be honest most articles I see outlining Mastodon server costs are on some extremely expensive cloud-hosts paying multiples of what they would really need to pay to run the same service.
My experience comes from self-hosting in cloud and at home (as I am including the costs of the specific server needed in both cases).
Yes, I am focusing here on Mastodon alone. I am currently supporting GoToSocial project which has a good focus in low resources :3
Does it not depend on the amount of followers ? https://ar.al/2022/11/09/is-the-fediverse-about-to-get-fryed-or-why-every-toot-is-also-a-potential-denial-of-service-attack/
Yes, complex topic. But I think Masto.host is over-charging massively for bigger instances. My impression is that the person running that service doesn’t actually want to host large instances that would be better off on their own dedicated hardware and thus over-charges them to make them consider moving elsewhere.