Yeah really. Watch whiteness work.
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More positively, though, this discussion provides mutilple opportunities for white SocialHub and SWICG leaders and members to very visibly try to do something about anti-Blackness in your spaces … or just as visibly choose not to, and signal to the world that you personally and collectively are so content with being in an anti-Black environment that you won’t even make an effort to change it.
It’ll be interesting to see how you respond!
Uh-huh.
My apologies. I thought Jason’s post was both unhelpful and deeply disrespectful of your contributions, which is why I found it so infuriating. Same with the way his follow-up comment doubled down on ignoring your presence here, and in this very conversation.
I’m sorry I failed to respond in an appropriate manner. How would you respond to Jason’s comments?
if it means anything, i didn’t take it personally (it’s not about my contributions). at least, if it was about either of these two bits:
i didn’t really see this as dismissive as much as it may have been a misunderstanding. because we certainly agree in substance, at least:
the main thing i’d like to expand upon insofar as i can speak for myself: when i was talking about having lower needs met, it wasn’t to imply anything about “having the privilege to care about technology” but rather to bring a personal example that affects me and several brilliant people i know, who are chronically underemployed and more often than not having trouble making ends meet. i’m thinking in particular of one Black friend of mine with whom i’ve had many avid conversations about the liberatory potential of various technologies, and the reason they mostly dropped off the fediverse is because they had to find work. this was before the fediverse got “big”. we still talk sometimes, but they’ve got a lot on their plate that isn’t strictly social related or tech related, so we don’t talk as often as i’d like, and they’re mostly off of social media as far as i can tell. yes, there are other brilliant Black people who are in a relatively better position and don’t have to worry about relatively imminent threats of homelessness or starvation, who have a basic level of security in their lives already. that paragraph wasn’t about them. the second paragraph is.
again, the point i’m trying to make here is that the focus should be on identifying needs. a needs-based approach is going to get to the heart of what we can really do to make things better. there’s a lot of pontificating about what various people think Black people need. a lot of those same people don’t actually talk to or reach out to any Black people. from my understanding, Jason was upset at this. they bring up an important point here:
the “powerful friends” and “generational networking” thing probably applies less to socialhub but it applies more to the swicg because the w3c is, as a standards organization, well… do i even need to say it?
at the end of the day i’m here in this space (as a nonwhite and very much brown person, yes) because i kind of just wandered in one day and didn’t leave. there’s been a lot of stuff that’s come up over the years that’s been disappointing or disillusioning but idk, i guess i’m just very patient. i think this is a viewpoint that is generally shared by some prominent Black fedi users, but we’re still here (despite the racism) because we want to make a difference and build a community (in spite of the racists).
if i’ve misunderstood or misrepresented or just generally didn’t get something, please feel free to correct me.
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that’s how I interpreted Jason’s post as well. I didn’t hear you echoing a techno-libertarian view of the web or world or saying it was their problem to solve … so I didn’t think his remarks were directed at you.
and very much agreed about the importance of being able to meet people’s day-to-day needs (also highlighted in the Black Panther Program earlier in this thread).
attitude shared by some prominent Black fedi users.
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I’ve had the pleasure of interacting with two of you on multiple occasions and can say I understand your motives and heart posture to be genuine.
In regard to the topic, I believe initiating discussions is important, Jon did a solid by starting this one here. It must be more consistent and spread across platforms. Start online meetings and hope people show up, create polling posts, connect with Blacksky, prominent Black & Brown people on Fedi and encourage notable Fediverse stakeholders to do so as well.
Honestly, it boils down to caring
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I just wrote a brief note about SocialHub’s well-being procedure. The topic name “SocialHub: Made By You” could be a slogan, to highlight that SocialHub can only be “Made By Us” when people step to the plate and dedicate to the chores of community building.
And chores need not necessarily be boring. Realising a proper focus on diversity and tweaking policies that actually work in practice, can be a very rewarding and uplifiting experience. I would invite anyone with a passion for these topics to consider taking a role in the @well-being team, and start iterating on better well-being procedures.
Focusing on diversity and equity certainly isn’t boring, and I agree that it can be very rewarding and uplifting. So I think it would be great if people here did more of it. As @DameO says, it starts with caring.
But it’s not at all clear to me that most SocialHub regulars actually care about getting more Black people involved. There hasn’t been a lot of participation on this thread. The ideas of asking for input and focusing on meeting people’s needs are good ones, but there’s no evidence that people have followed up on it.
Then there’s the reaction to Jason’s intervention. @strypey’s response is what it is. Perhaps even more importantly, nobody other than @trwnh pushed back on it – and nobody other than me even supported @trwnh. Similarly, there have been a couple of clear recent examples of racism in other threads, and nobody’s said anything.
Of course the thread isn’t done yet, and neither are discussions of racial issues here, so maybe things will change. But as it is … I shared this thread with a couple of Black people, and it was interesting hearing their perspectives. As one phrased it (quoted with permission),
“the white people in that group really don’t want any Black and brown input, do they?”
So its current form, it’s a big red warning flag to any Black person thinking of participating – and probably to other people of color as well. If that’s what you collectiely want, so be it. If that’s not what you want … as @aschrijver says, what are you going to to to change it?
I just want to remind folk here who may not have realized this was happening, we had an interesting exchange in one of the matrix channels yesterday.
The summary? A bunch of people left there who really care about this topic.
Why? Because the general attitude seems to be, and I am aware this is a TL;DR, that the prevailing attitude favours freeze peach philosophy over actually making people feel safe.
As @DameO wrote, as @JasonJV complained about and @trwnh supported, as @jdp23 echoed, start with caring.
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One thing that comes to mind - jumping back to technical things, but also to praxis - is that there seem to be a lot of conversations on fedi how moderation might work at scale, but at least scanning through headlines, I can’t seem to find any related FEPs. I wouldn’t mind contributing to one, but not being a fedi dev, I can’t do that alone. Ping me if you’re interested?
And no, that’s not the end of this conversation, either.
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I am not aware of that matrix discussion, no. Generally speaking for SocialHub I hope that people won’t shy away or deliberately shun taking positions to help improve community health. People of color, join. Everyone is welcome, and the more diverse the folks involved with moderation and well-being, the more assurance there is that much needed diversity improvements take place. I cared for this community with hundreds of hours volunteered, and I hope to pass the torch to many others that follow. Encouraging signs already, as @trwnh joined the FEP facilitators team. 
It would be great if e.g. @jdp23 and @DameO joined @well-being for instance.
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I try not to contribute to any thread unless I have, minimum, one helpful link, concept, or perspective to bring per comment-- that’s my rule of thumb. I have a lot of thoughts I am sparing this group: Am I being complicit if I don’t contribute to a pile-on shaming jason for his slightly-more-emotional-than-reasoned post in this thread, or for reading too fast to catch the bit about non-white contributors here? Are white latinos and puerto ricans “non-white” for these purposes? What would it hearten and encourage an intimidated new-to-fedi non-technical admin or organizer to see on this forum? Is it worth rebutting an ungenerous reading of my first post?
I think anyone who cares enough to read this far or posting to this thread does care, and it’s unhelpful to say “VOLUNTEER HARDER” to people already volunteering. The people who actually don’t care aren’t here being berated. The people here, at most, aren’t effectively finding ways to contribute substantially to the core issue, or see the core issue differently. I’m not sure contrition or caring harder will help that discovery issue, much less the ideological issue, nor will it reshape the discourse in a way that helps.
Following @jfinkhaeuser 's lead, I’d also like to get more practical here. (Sidenote just to @jfinkhaeuser : I can’t think of any FEPs relevant to the “identity-system gaps” which Jerry Bell explains in his linked post, but I do think someone with Matrix experience would be really relevant in the CG task force on moderation tooling, if you’re at liberty to do the IPR-release for CG work.)
Let’s pragmaticize a little bit and try and put all the blood-boiling context out of scope for a minute. What user story are we solving for here, that’s SH-specific? Does an intimidated, new-to-fedi user come to SH wanting to participate in software and/or protocol governance and implementation and get bounced because something in the forum’s structure feels unfriendly to new folk, and/or folk that “look different” from the forum’s average participant? Or are we just tone-policing how people participate in the forum? What would addressing this issue look like, and how would it be measured? I can’t say I quite grok what we’re even discussing here, bluster and blame aside.
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FWIW, I created Moderation related FEPs to talk more about potential FEPs I can think of.
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I think it’s good to keep gathering feature ideas and community experiences out here where no IPR agreement is needed. FEPs are good at documenting prototypes and I would still love to see “retro-FEPs” written to self-document how federated block lists and relays are ALREADY working, since this would save the CG a lot of time reverse-engineering from code…
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I have a partially-written document describing the Mastodon and LitePub relay protocols. But is this related to moderation? I might have misinterpreted what you want to see.
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I think Relays are actually super useful to both moderation and inclusion. One crucial “growth hack” for making new populations feel like they have strength in numbers across fedi (rather than on one “server”) would be something like Blacksky (a feed for boosting discovery), which makes the most sense in the Masto-verse architecture as a Relay (or at least as some kind of subscribable/shareable list, a primitive we don’t quite have yet but would probably need to hang off of Relays if they existed). So little is written and known about relays how would we point people interested in building something like Blacksky?
Any interest in throwing a partially-written Relay doc over the fence and letting others finish it? That would be a huge help IMHO…
It’s currently a draft blog article, but I can convert into an informational WIP FEP easily enough. I’ll try to do that in the next few days. The initial document will need some work so there will be plenty of opportunity for others to help with augmenting or correcting some of the details. The information is based mostly on reverse-engineering Mastodon’s relay-related code and the Activity Relay implementation.
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There’ll be a bunch coming: GitHub - swicg/activitypub-trust-and-safety: AP Trust and Safety Task Force repository
Unfortunately I had to delay a month due to suddenly needing heart surgery this month
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