At the end of FediForum I mentioned the fediverse’s long-standing issues related to anti-Blackness, and how FediForum itself had only addressed one of the five bullets from the discussion at a September 2023 session. But it’s a problem more generally for fediverse institutions, and SocialHub and SWICG and social
“beliefs, attitudes, actions, practices, and behaviors of individuals, institutions, software, and systems that devalue, minimize, and marginalize the full participation of Black people across the world”
To be clear, this isn’t the only diversity and equity issue to be concerned about, it’s just one that’s gotten a lot of attention … so a good place to start discussions.
ONE thing being done is that the new SWICG task force (and IFTAS work to date) has been trying to attack the major technical and tooling deficits that create gaps for abuse, succintly yet thoroughly described in this post by admin Jerry Bell. I want to jump in here and invite anyone who is tempted to answer this opening post with technical solutions to go there instead and contribute to cross-implementation tooling directly.
As for the cultural aspects you describe quite well, I personally am impressed by the path taken by BlackSky, which is basically a “starter-pack” (curated public follow-list) that any new user of bsky can find easily and apply with a few clicks to fill their feed with some of bsky’s most interesting black voices. This functions as a kind of booster-shot, 10Xing the positive feeling of community and dialogue so that if a bsky user’s first few weeks on bsky included a few flareups of white nonsense, it would be averaged out and more easily forgotten. To be honest, I follow that list for the same reason-- I was seeing a little too much white nonsense on my bsky feed, and following a few black scholars and political commentators helped balance it out a bit. I’m STARVING for such one-click solutions to even out the distro of white nonsense on masto.
Sometimes it’s easier to build positive community than police toxic anti-community forces or remediate deeply-entrenched habits that erode community. Who is building (community and/or community-tech) on the positive side? Who is making implementation-independent follow-list or starter-pack functionality? Who is curating lists like this without that? Helping them might get us somewhere productive quickly.
I guess I wasn’t clear, I was specifically asking about how to make progress on the almost complete absence of Black people in SocialHub and SWICG discussions? The new SWICG trust and safety task force is great, and so is BlackSky, but they’re addressing different problems.
@bumblefudge did you mean to link to the website taskforce above? Or were you trying to refer to the Trust and Safety Taskforce?
@jdp23 As for the absence of Black people in SocialHub and SWICG discussions, we provide an open space for discussions, however people need to be willing to contribute and make their voices heard, otherwise it ends up being “white person’s interpretation a what a black person said” or even “white person’s interpretation of a black person’s lived experience”.
Whilst I’m hoping we can certainly capture a decent number of issues related to trust and safety from the posts by notable black people within the Fediverse, having folks come and participate is best: it doesn’t cost anything besides time (and IP if you contribute it).
As for the demographic of this developer community (whether by “this community” you mean social hub, fedidevs, swicg, or any combination of the 3), I am sadly a bit pessimistic here. I think the dev community demographic skew as white, privileged, and linuxy as the daily user population of today’s AP software. I personally wouldn’t expect the former to change before the latter, and I wouldn’t expect the latter to change before the T&S system has been upgraded enough to make Jerry Bell’s post an interesting historical document. At the moment it’s still a painful to-do list of necessary-but-insufficient conditions for generalized safety from the sorts of “abuse” that will tick up sharply if more user-friendly software floods the channels of federation with normie users. I tend to see the failure of Black Mastodon as a proof that Mastodon was not “ready for primetime” and it will be a while until we have another such opportunity to onboard a million users. I hope we’re ready for the next wave by the time it comes.
I have been low-key lobbying for the utility of moderation audit logs for over a year and I think it’s in scope for the SWICG task force, so opening the same issue here might help more than asking any one implementation to be the first to implement audit logs in a given format?
I think some kind of uniform logging (that might even be neutral enough to wire formats that it would work for events/events from other protocols or for objects defined in FEPs/extensions to AP) is already being discussed in that task force, so one more vote for the basic idea in a public, official place would probably help the cause even if you don’t have time to contribute otherwise to the TF
they are not moderation logs, they are (minimal) federation logs. just tracking why an object exists (or would exist - the bruteforce approach doesn’t make the distinction, remember to rotate your logs) in the database.
they aren’t designed for government surveillance, they aren’t even access logs. they’re just the minimal set of metadata that’s needed to effectively moderate a fedi instance without throwing trans ppl under the bus.
Don’t worry about this, @codenamedmitri, we can move things around without compromising the original topic. What’s more important here is that the conversation flows, and the intersectionality appears. Protecting trans-people and racialized people is definitely on-topic of addressing “the almost complete absence of Black people, etc.”, and actually, I find this kind of dismissive “off-topic” reply on the very topic of inclusivity, coming from a white male person, part of why Black people would not participate in a(n almost) white-only community.
The most “native” #DIY path for this would be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Panther_Party, and it’s interesting to honestly think what this path would mean for the messy narrow paths we enforce here. And how would we really need to change to challenge the path most people enforce, to be native.
Think before answering, if you can, thanks.
We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our Black Community.
We want full employment for our people.
We want an end to the robbery by the Capitalists of our Black Community.
We want decent housing, fit for shelter of human beings.
We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in present-day society.
We want all Black men to be exempt from military service.
We want an immediate end to POLICE BRUTALITY and MURDER of Black people.
We want freedom for all Black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails.
We want all Black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from their Black Communities, as defined by the Constitution of the United States.
We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace.
If you treat these as tech metaphors, you get a pretty good image of why meany people build the Fediverse and ActivityPub, so it is a shared common, but as people say a very narrow and intolerant one much of the time, this is an unhelpful mess we need to change.
I can’t help but be reminded of the earnest discussions that used to go on in the Aotearoa punk scene (probably still do) about why punk gigs were mostly full of white people. I assumed it was because punk music just wasn’t that appealing to most brown people(1), and that instead of going to punk shows, they were busy partying it up at hip-hop and reggae shows, and other places where the music they tended to like was being played.
It was assumed that the lack of brown people at punk gigs was a consequence of implicit racism on behalf of the punks, and especially the organisers of punk gigs. But if there was any implicit racism involved, it was just as likely to be in the assumption that brown people ought to be interested in punk, even though they mostly weren’t. Also in the way that some of the anarchists who saw our politics enacted in the DIY punk subculture, couldn’t see that it was reflected just as much in other subcultures that tended to have a lot more brown people involved; especially hiphop, but also reggae, rave etc.
The other thing I think a lot of people miss is that all else being equal, the larger a group is, the more likely it is to be representative of the demographics of the larger population. If it isn’t there’s a good chance there’s implicit bias behind that. Whereas the smaller a group is, the less likely it’s demographics are to mirror those of the population as a whole, no matter how progressive and inclusive its members and processes are.
A quick web search tells me that the population of the internet is about 5 1/2 billion people. What’s the population of the fediverse developer community? Let’s be generous and says its 550 (although I suspect it’s not that many), because that makes the maths easy. That makes us about 0.01% of that population. The chances of our demographics reflecting the overall population are about a snowballs chance in hell.
So before we talk about ways to make our developer community (or the software freedom movement in general) less unattractive to people who aren’t white, it’s worth noting that there are a few other possible reasons they’re not here.
One is that the fediverse (not the internet, not social media, but the fediverse specifically), isn’t that interesting to them. To the degree they share the politics that motivate us to volunteer our time on this, they enact them in other ways, in other places. Maybe rather than obsess about how to get them into our spaces, maybe we need to make an effort to build relationships with them as people and spend time in their spaces (when invited)?
Secondly, maybe its just an accident of history that our tiny community currently skews white. Maybe the only things required to bring more ethnic diversity into our community is time and growth?
Having said all that, I want to make it clear that @jdp23 has done us a service by inviting us to reflect on this. I think there are things we can do to actively diversify the fediverse developer community.
As with the hip-hop and reggae fandoms my well-meaning punk friends weren’t thinking about as fellow DIY subcultures, there are whole parallel tech industries out there that we can’t always see. Even on the internet, because much of it happens in languages we can’t understand, written in characters we can’t read. Like our tech industry, it has a strong open source movement, and within that a software freedom contingent. We know it also has a fediverse contingent, because of all the servers out there run by Chinese, Japanese, Indians and so on.
So for a start, let’s reach out to the admins and evangelists on servers like that. Find out what software they’re using, and if any of it is forked or developed in-house, rather than downloaded verbatim from the repos we’re familiar with. Find out where they’re hanging out, and politely ask to come along. So we can see what kinds of spaces they like to socialise and work in - online and offline - and how they do and don’t differ from the ones we inhabit.
I had some fascinating experiences going to a Coopathon in Hong Kong and an internet culture conference in Hangzhou, where the common language was Mandarin (which I don’t speak more than a smattering of), rather than English. I almost went to FOSSAsia in Singapore, but then this pesky global pandemic happened. I’m not familiar with software freedom and open source related events in India. But I see Indian-looking bylines and Hindi-looking names more and more in web searches about Free Code software, in issue discussions on code forges, and so on, so I guarantee you they exist.
What I’m saying is, we need to be wary of trying to enlighten the brown people by introducing them to the joys of punk and hardcore. It’s just as likely that we need to be enlightened by being introduced to the joys of hip-hop and reggae. That way we’ve got a much better chance of building larger events that can include both, and by doing so, include the people who are into them.
EDIT: The Fediverse Ideas issue I just posted under the name White Mirror is tangentially relevant to this discussion.
(1) It didn’t feel right to say “non-white people”, and we didn’t have many black people in Aotearoa at the time, so I went with “brown people”.
this is probably what i’d point to as the most significant takeaway for anyone interested in making a difference. the question of “why aren’t black people involved in fedi” can be answered by “well, they’re trying/tried that, and it didn’t meet their needs”.
i’m going to go out on a bit of a limb here and say that the kinds of people who spend their time engaging in software freedom discussions are generally considered “stable” in other aspects of their life, at least for the present moment. if they weren’t, then “software freedom” suddenly becomes a lot less of a concern in their day-to-day life. as important as it is, and as much of a difference as it can make, there are simply higher priorities when considering any people’s needs. if you want to look at it through the lens of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, then why would anyone be expected to spend more of their time focusing on the “social” needs when they may be struggling to fulfill their “safety” and “physiological” needs?
using myself as an example: i’m not white. (i’m also not black, but that’s less relevant.) naturally, my lived experience and my view of the world is not going to align with the experiences and views of people who are privileged to be “the default”, who generally don’t have to worry about the concept of “race” except at the fleeting moments when it becomes conscious to them. so if you think my views are valuable or relevant to the discussion, then realize that my continued existence in these spaces is largely a factor of my continued security, which in turn is a factor of my having continued access to food and shelter. the moment that anything in the hierarchy below “social” is dropped or threatened, would you really expect me to continue to be here discussing any of the things we’re discussing? i’d say “no”, you should be expecting me to be desperately looking for a source of income to the point that it bars me from having these discussions. if i run out of money entirely, i am no longer “safe”, and at that point, my physiological needs are next on the chopping block – if things continue to get worse beyond that point, then i will be looking for food and shelter, not solutions to the problems of the software freedom movement or social communication theory.
(it is at this point in writing this post that i’m going to briefly mention that i’m somewhat desperately looking for employment or financial contributions to support my continued work in this space. i’ll just point to ~a and leave it at that. this thread isn’t about me.)
so, what is one to do if they want more voices in this space? well, step one is making sure that they have their lower-level needs covered. if you want more black people to participate in socialhub or swicg stuff, then work toward implementing societal measures that allow anyone to have food and shelter, and to be secured by a social safety net, before they can participate in any social capacity. due to racism and its historical and present effects on society, this should have an outsized impact on non-white people, who tend to be statistically more likely to not have their basic (physiological and security) needs met. if you want a specific person or class of people to be represented here, then work to cover that specific person or that specific class of people’s needs.
at the point that basic needs are covered and your desired audience is capable of participating in a “social” layer, then step two is to identify their social needs. like, actually talk to them and figure out what their needs actually are. get to know people and get to know what is missing from their life, what would acutely benefit them in a social sense, and think about what you can do to address those social needs. but also, invite them to the discussion. if they’re not convinced of the need to participate in discussions around the open social web, then you’re going to have to think really hard and come up with a reason for why they should care. this goes back to identifying what their needs are in the first place.
for example, a social need may be expressed like so:
“i want to foster and maintain friendships”
“i want to talk to my family”
“i am looking for intimacy”
“i want a sense of connection to people similar to me”
notice that none of these needs require software freedom. it’s more about the “belonging” and less about the particulars of where that “belonging” is facilitated. so what you need to do now is identify how your cause of “software freedom” can better facilitate social connection.
for example:
“closed social networks prevent you from contacting people on other closed social networks. if we built and used an open network where people can contact other people regardless of which site they’re on, then you wouldn’t have to worry about not being able to contact someone because they’re not on the same network as you.”
“closed social networks can shut down or become worse at any time. an open network can never be completely shut down, and there is no single entity that can make it worse for everyone else.”
“closed social networks do not prioritize or respect your needs; usually, they are often run by private entities that can interfere with your communications on that network. an open network allows you to continue communicating through other service providers.”
i could go on, of course. but suffice to say that you will not get very far in getting anyone involved “on here” unless you demonstrate to them that their needs are at least being considered.
as for the specific needs of black people as a community, to the extent that such a community exists: i can’t speak for anyone. i would advise anyone who wants to know more about the needs of such a community to reach out and solicit feedback from community members. maybe they will tell you something that you hadn’t considered before. maybe they’ll bring up a reason why they see one protocol or network as better than another. maybe they’ll bring up something far more concrete and utilitarian in their user experience that might be present or missing across different softwares. maybe there’s nothing they can really point to other than “the people i want to talk to are on this network but not this other network”. idk, go find out for yourself.
Thanks everybody for the discussion … a few comments
I think the dev community demographic skew as white, privileged, and linuxy as the daily user population of today’s AP software.
No, the daily user population of today’s AP software is noticeably more diverse than participation here and on the SWICG mailing list. There are in fact Black people and women of color on the fediverse.
Right, and attempts to improve the situation need to take those into account. It’s a challenging situation, some of the specific issues (including Meta’s role) might not be addressable in a W3C context. . So, given the history it’s hard to know how much can be done with the current organizational structure … but it’s still worth looking for ways to make progress.
what is one to do if they want more voices in this space? well, step one is making sure that they have their lower-level needs covered.
Agreed that’s a critical step – and getting lower-level needs covered for people like you and Emelia who have put in a lot of unpaid time doing valuable work here over the years is critical too, it can’t be one at the expense of the other. Unfortunately, historically the dynamics mean that almost none of the money goes to Black people. For that matter the dynamics also mean that relatively little of the money goes to the issues that Black people are most concerned about – including trust and safety.
If there’s enough funding for the trust and safety taskforce to cover the two of you and several others, at least in part-time roles, that would be a good way to make progress on multiple fronts. But it’s still swimming upstream.
We want an end to the robbery by the Capitalists of our Black Community.
Yeah, well, Meta’s made bank robbing Black communities, so the SWICG’s embrace of them isn’t encouraging on that front.
So for a start, let’s reach out to the admins and evangelists on servers like that. Find out what software they’re using, and if any of it is forked or developed in-house, rather than downloaded verbatim from the repos we’re familiar with.
like, actually talk to them and figure out what their needs actually are. get to know people and get to know what is missing from their life, what would acutely benefit them in a social sense, and think about what you can do to address those social needs. but also, invite them to the discussion.
Agreed that’s a good thing to do (although the long history of SWICG and SocialHub not doing that makes it challenging). My experience, having done a fair amount of that, is that a lot of their needs are similar to everybody else’s; for example, there’s broad agreement that “closed social networks do not prioritize or respect your needs” (it’s just that today’s fediverse does an even worse job – Mekka’s point that many Black people encounter more hate speech and harassment on Mastodon than on Twitter. On the other hand, there are also major differences; “an open network where people can contact other people regardless of which site they’re on” also means “racists can contact Black people regardless of what site they’re on” so that doesn’t actually sound quite so appealing.
as for the specific needs of black people as a community, to the extent that such a community exists: i can’t speak for anyone. i would advise anyone who wants to know more about the needs of such a community to reach out and solicit feedback from community members. maybe they will tell you something that you hadn’t considered before. maybe they’ll bring up a reason why they see one protocol or network as better than another… idk, go find out for yourself.
Agreed although a caveat: before reaching out, do your homework first. There’s a lot that’s been written about concrete and utilitarian issues. If you haven’t already done the research and incorporated that into your thinking, it’s going to come across as wasting their time and disrespectful.
So, summing up the concrete ideas from this thread so far:
Make progress on funding for Black people (as well as other long-time contributors, especially those who are marginalized in other dimensions)
Do the research to understand the needs, issues, and tradeoffs that have been articulated already, and then reaching out to Black communities on and off today’s fedvierse and invite discussions
Obviously there’s some of my own perspectives in there (especially #2), but does that in general seem like an accurate summary?
This was one of the more upsetting things I’ve read in a long time. Great initial question, was disappointed by the answers. So much so I made an account and I’m commenting despite my better judgement.
I obviously cannot speak on behalf of the Black community, so I’ll say this.
I don’t know many people of color in my circles, on and offline, who would join these groups, get their picture taken for the website’s homepage, only to work towards achieving a very white, very techno-libertarian worldview of the web (and the world for that matter).
Your problem isn’t about having the privilege to care about technology. Go to my TikTok, click on the following link, and pick five Black or brown accounts. Those communities absolutely care about tech and how it relates to politics, culture, the environment, and many other factors.
Go speak to them. Open a dialogue. Get out of this very insular community with seemingly no shortage of very powerful friends, and go speak to the Black and brown people using the tech you’re making decisions for. I promise you won’t miss. 5/5 randoms in my following list will be wildly insightful. Or literally just scroll the FYP.
You know why Harvard used to pro-actively seek out under represented races? It wasn’t because those students weren’t interested in Ivy League education. It’s because systemic racism has destroyed the generation networking required to get your kid into a good school by making a phone call. Just like the generational networking it takes for your group leaders to pal around with Mark Zuckerberg.
Go speak with them. By god, never show them this thread, but reach out. This is your problem to solve. Not theirs.
Also, drop the damn technical requirement. It’s perpetuating the broken system that created a disproportionately low number of Black and brown technologists.
There are expects, literal geniuses in internet culture in the black communities. How on earth hasn’t anyone from these groups called on them?
Thanks for making the effort, and for offering these challenges. I hope you don’t mind me doing the same.
Because I have to be honest, I found your comments infuriating. While I’ve gone to quite some effort to edit this response for tone and constructiveness, I can’t rule out the possibility of some of that fury seeping through regardless.
For a start, I’m not sure why you thought it was helpful to hurl a generic ‘racism bad’ lecture at us. I get a visceral thrill from shouting rhetoric as much as the next guy, so if racism could be fixed by just shouting enough rhetoric at people, I’d spend my days doing little else. Believe me ; )
Sadly, in my experience, effective cross-cultural organising requires more than just lambasting people for not fixing the world already. What we need is practical ideas for how to do that. But having read your post several times, I can’t see a single insight or actionable suggestion that wasn’t already mentioned by the people you’re lecturing. One of whom is, as they said in their post, a person of colour (@trwnh).
As for me, yes, I’m “white” by ancestry AFAIK(1). But I’ll wager I’ve been doing anti-racist work longer than you’ve been alive.
I grew up in Christchurch, one of the most subliminally white supremacist cities in the Asia-Pacific. But my father has been a stanch anti-racist all my life. He marched against the Springbok tour in 1981, in protest against apartheid in South Africa, and then became involved in decolonisation work here in Aotearoa.
As a result, I was one of the few white kids at my primary school who was friends with the few kids who were Māori (the indigenous people of Aotearoa), or from immigrant families. At high school in the early 1990s, I started learning the Māori language, cultural protocols, history and worldview. I continued to do so after high school, informally, and then in university papers on Te Reo Māori and Māori philosophy.
When I co-founded the IMC for our country, I was one of the people making sure it was called Aotearoa Indymedia, not New Zealand Indymedia. Making sure that we sent people to cover hui (meetings), wānanga (workshops), protests and occupations by iwi Māori, and other non-white activist groups. To invite, encourage and support them to use our open publishing newswire to tell their own stories.
I published many pieces for Indymedia.org.nz in solidarity with Māori concerns, here’s archived versions of a sample;
It was through my work with Indymedia that I learned about the cause of software freedom that underlies Open Source. Since then, part of my work has been Mahi Rorohiko, protecting the software freedoms of people involved in indigenous language revitalisation;
“Te Reo Māori advocates have done significant work over the past 20 years to build and advocate for the software tools which are needed to allow us to communicate in Te Reo Māori online. My focus is on supporting free code developers to make sure their software implement these tools, but also reducing the work involved, both for the developers themselves, and the maintainers of Te Reo digital resources.”
When I co-founded the project to port the CreativeCommons licenses to our jurisdiction, again, I made sure it was called CC Aotearoa/NZ, not CC NZ. When it was suggested that CC licenses might be useful to stewards of indigenous knowledge, I did serious thinking about this, wrote a paper on it, and presented it at an academic conference about it. When CC A/NZ was restructured to separate the legal team from the advocacy project, the latter was gifted the name Tohatoha by Māori elders.
When I served on the Council of Permaculture in NZ, I was nominated the Cultural Officer. I made it a priority to hold space for Māori people involved in the organisation. I was involved in creating a Bicultural Officer role in the Council, to be held by a Māori person, and formalising a role for a kaumātua (cultural elder), as first steps towards bicultural governance of the organisation.
When the PiNZ Hui (our annual gathering) was held in the region of Taranaki, a decision was made to hold it at a camp ground. Breaking a tradition of making sure the money spent on Hui goes to local Māori, by holding it at a marae (traditional cultural centre). In response, I was involved in facilitating Te Ohu Pai Mahi o Parihaka, a multi-day permablitz (like a working bee) at Parihaka Pā. A community in Taranaki, nationally famous for their history of nonviolent resistance to colonisation.
This is just a small sample of my anti-racist work within activist organisations. I say all of this not to blow my own trumpet. But because the part of my comments where I talked about my time in China clearly wasn’t enough context to convince you that I’m not coming from the place of knee-jerk “white fragility” that your comments seem to assume. They come from decades of practical experience doing the things @jdp23 challenged us to do in the OP.
It’s easy to lob vague accusations around. But how about you explain exactly what you mean by “techno-libertarian”. Or why you seem to think it’s a bad thing. Or what makes it a “white” worldview, rather than being a shared view among humans who don’t want all digital spaces to be Pravda for corporate stalinism.
Uh-huh.
So what do we do differently?
Uh-huh.
So nothing new to add. Except of course for cheap shots like …
Meta is now in the fediverse, and that’s a fact we need to respond to, for better or for worse. But nobody on SocialHub invited them. The idea that anyone here has “very powerful friends”, or that we would “pal around” with ZuckerBorg (even if we were somehow invited to), is as laughable as it is incorrect.
You’ve clearly made no effort to learn about the histories and cultures of the people who participate in this forum before wading in. Nor those of the many and varied fediverse projects we’ve worked on. Which says far more about your own level of intercultural competence than it does about ours.
Since we’re making wild assumptions about each other’s backgrounds, let me guess. USAmerican? Never been out outside the country? Certainly never lived outside it? Am I right?
Because the people who participate here come from a much wider range of countries and cultural backgrounds than people used to US-centric race discourse tend to assume. It’s important to make sure that diversity increases as our numbers grow. But people stomping around expecting everyone to look at the world through their US-centric cultural lenses only makes that harder.
What does this even mean? As you’ve demonstrated, the only requirement for participating here is creating an account, and typing words. Once the AP support in Discourse allows posting with your fediverse account, all that’s required will be the typing. The same is true of starting conversations on the community forums or issue trackers of software project, to report problems or request features, including those with culturally-specific aspects.
Name some, or the group names they organise under, so we can contact them. Even better, tell us how they prefer to be approached, or what we might be able to do for them. Eg what we can do that could make the fediverse more useful to their work. As you say;
Uh-huh. That’s why @jdp23 started the conversation, and why I responded. I don’t see anyone trying to offload responsibility, in his OP or in our responses. Where do you see it?
(1) One result of colonisation is that indigenous ancestors often got whitewashed out of the family trees of anyone in previous generations who could pass as non-indigenous. A lot of the oral histories and personal effects that could have corrected that whitewashing have been lost.
So there are people who grow up in Aotearoa being told our olive complexions and dark hair come from Italian ancestry, only to find out later that’s not actually the case. While others never get to learn the truth.
i have updated the link in question.
