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”.