Please flag such posts, this is not acceptable. Discussions on the SocialHub are getting longer every day, and it’s very difficult to read everything, so if you spot something wrong, flag it! It will be brought to immediate attention of the moderators, and then we can do something about it.
In the past we’ve had to deal with very problematic behaviors from core people in this community and we had to take hard decisions. There are very well documented discussions as part of the Well-Being process – part of which is available to the community members (TL2+), and longer, harder discussions among the @well-being.team which are more private, but nonetheless intense and spanning weeks or months. Some decisions are hard to make. But certainly, occurrences of racism on this forum are off limits.
I saw a post from well-known TERF and former Truth Social CTO Alex Gleason that he was no longer welcome in the Fediverse Developers Network chat rooms … his instance is widely blocked (as it should be!) so I don’t know how much visibility it got.
Good job banning him, allowing people like him in spaces is toxic – even if they’re just lurking, spying on people, taking screenshots they can decontextualize and distort to sow dissent and spread disinformation. I generally think the “Nazi bar” analogy for social networks is over used, but this is a situation where it really does 100% apply.
And good point that it relates to this issue as well, while his TERFiness and tools to violate consent get most of the focus, he also is a white supremacist. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
That said … the decontextualized screenshot he shared (if it isn’t fake) has the moderator asking him to leave because he made people uncomfortable. That by itself isn’t a good reason to ask people to leave or ban them. My post talking in Clarifying the origin and evolution of the term "the fediverse" - #2 by jdp23 made people uncomfortable (both because it calls attention to the way white male dominance is so normalized around here, whcih people don’t like to acknowledge or talk about, and because of the specific formatting I used to make that point). And I’m white, if I were a Black woman people would be describing me as “angry” and complaining about how my “lack of civility” (or whatever) makes them extra uncomfortable! So I’d either get asked to leave, or told that I need to “moderate my tone” because I was making people “uncomfortable”. And the (decontextualized, potentially fake) screenshot makes it look like a couple of people talked to the moderator who then made a decision … if that’s really how it was, well it was a good decision in this case, but also now’s a very good time to get a better process in place.
So especially in a high-profile case like this it would be great for the moderators and FediDevs admins to issue a statement about what happened – clarifying the grounds and process – and then do some after-action analysis to look at where there are areas for impovement and what else can be learned as well as what went well (and getting him out of there is a very good outcome).
Yeah I can certainly see the challenges for the @well-being team keeping up with the volume here. What’s really needed is an “alert” (instead of flag), which tells the moderators they should look at it but doesn’t tell the person whose post has been flagged or take it down temporarily. Not sure if there’s a way to get Discourse to do that but if there is this could be a good way to get more community involvement here.
But it’s not all on the moderators. In one of the cases I actually pointed out in the thread that a specific term the person used was racist when it was used to dismiss a Black person’s opinions, and asked them to please not do it. My assumption was that they hadn’t realized that it was racist, and wouldn’t do it again, and ideally edit their post (which was using the term to dismiss the opiniosn of relative newcomers to the Fediverse in general, many of whom are Black) to remove it. But no, instead, they used it again, referring to a specific Black person. Even if nobody on @well-being saw that, and even if nobody wanted to flag it, anybody could have said something.
In my experience as community facilitator editing someone’s post without consent upfront does not work, and in many cases will back-fire. People get furious seeing an edit to their post without being informed on that, even when it was done with the best of intentions.
Yet well-being procedures should explicitly deal with the case that you mention. A longer, more elaborate process should be followed I think, that leads to a final outcome of retroactively correcting all occurences if the correction is deemed justified. Subsequently a CoC or a moderator’s log might be updated as well to refer to the outcome in future cases.
Agree about generally not editing other posts, I had just meant that ideally they would have edited their own post. It’s a tricky situation, it’s true that a final outcome of people retroactively correcting their posts is a good one,. But often when people inadvertantly use some phrasing that turns out to be racist (or ablist, or sexist, or whatever) instead of saying “oops, I didn’t know, sorry about that” or even “i don’t understand why, but okay i don’t want to be racist, i’ll fix it, could you explain more?” they double down and repeat it. And that’s a situation where broader response from the community can make a difference
That is an interesting suggestion. I guess the best way to do it is to reach out to the Well-being team, e.g., message the @well-being or posting (anonymously if you prefer) into Well-Being, with a pointer to the original message. I agree the flag system auto-hiding posts and asking the person to edit their post may be a problem. I’ll try looking into it on the Discourse side.
Please do not hesitate to call our attention to the problematic places.
Oops. I can’t figure out how to DM @well-being … according to Discord’s documentation if I’m at Trust Level 1 or higher I should have a DM option on their profile but I don’t see it so I guess 47 posts isn’t enough to be trusted. The “anonymous” option is a useful alternative in general but it won’t actually keep me anonymous in this case (and the same’s true in other cases where context or writing style reveals who it is)
@aschrijver / @how on Hachyderm, we freeze the account from doing further interactions, and ask them to edit their post to have their account unfrozen.
Sorry, my mistake: @well-being is an account we can use to post in the forum as a team, instead of individually, so messages going there are not actually monitored.
Whenever you mention @well-being.team you mention the members and we all get a notification. The mention itself turns into a link that you can click to reach the message button.
For now, I’ll just post here with several examples and tag @well-being … and please leave it here – it’s useful to have this in the public thread discussing Black participation.
For people not mentioned here, please consider this a mini-tutorial for the kinds of things to recognize and respond to, either by calling in or calling out or letting the @well-being team know.
Especially if it’s the first time you’ve seen anti-Blackness from somebody and it seems like it was unintentional, very often a polite call in as a reply or direct message is a good option. Impact > intent, so a mistake can still cause harm even if it’s not intentional, but it’s more likely to be a good learning opportunity. Let them know they’ve said something unfortunate, explain why, and possibly follow up with them one-on-one or in a small group. For more on this tactic, see Harvard Diversity Inclusion and Belonging’s Calling In and Calling Out Guide and Loretta Ross’ Don’t Call People Out, Call Them In video and book Calling In.
EDIT: it really is very easy to unintentionally say problematic things when talking about these kinds of issues, so I apologize if I’ve done that here and in other posts … if so, please feel free to call me in (or out if you think it’ll be more effective)
The rest of this thread has examples of call-outs and call-ins.
To start with, here’s the details on the example I mentioned earlier:
WTF. Earlier I had gone the polite call-in route.
as Ernie Smith has pointed out, "Eternal November” is gatekeeping, and dismissing the opinions of Black people who checked out the Fediverse in November 2022 and either left because of its racism – or stayed despite the racism racism and are working to improve it – is not only gatekeeping but racist. So please don’t do that.
Strypey went ahead and did that anyhow. Oh well. Call-ins don’t always work.
In a reply @hamishcampbell pointed out that the terms are inside baseball, which is true and relates to my point about how it’s easy to say something unfortunate by mistake. Do we misremember Eternal September?Kevin Driscoll / University of virginia – Flow is a good discussion of Eternal September as it relates to the Twitter influx to Mastodon in 2022 (it links off to the Ernie Smith article I mentioned). A key point here is that many of the people coming from Twitter were Black and brown, and a lot the language that was used talking about them was racialized and used anti-immigrant tropes. So “Eternal November” echoes that.
None of that’s general knowledge, so my first response to Strypey was a call-in: a short description of the problem, and a polite request that he please stopped using the language. But he didn’t.
Also in that thread (and this is intended as a call-in!)
OK, Hamish doesn’t think it’s as central of an issue, but BIPOC people may well have a different view. He’s presenting his opinion that “the racism is less important in this context” as a fact – and isn’t including any BIPOC perspectives, so it gives them impression that he thinks they don’t matter. Also, he’s telling Black people (and anybody else) who’s not a techno-libertarian guy that they should hold their nose and put up with it.
This is also an example of where flagging (as implemented by Discourse) isnt a great solution. Hamish said a lot of other stuff in the thread, there’s no reason to hide it just because he used some unfortunate wording here.
(Of course in really blatant cases where somebody’s used the n-word or called queer people deviants, then hiding it can make sense (especially if that’s the only thing in the post) to reduce the harm to others who see the thread, but I haven’t seen any examples of the really blatant stuff during my time on SocialHub.)
In this thread:
First of all there’s the “how about you explain” attitude. As Ijeoma Oluo says in Welcome To The Anti-Racism Movement — Here’s What You’ve Missed, “Free, individualized education is not a thing we do anymore.” Do the work yourself instead of putting the burden on somebody who (for all you know) is a person of color. Then there’s the implication that anybody who doesn’t adhere to this white view is supporting “Pravda for corporate stalinism”.
There are a lot of other examples in Strypey’s post and followups, but I’ll leave them as an exercise for the readers.
Also in this thread (and again, a call-in)
It’s a good question to ask in general, but in this context changing the subject from the absence of Black people to “an intimidated new-to-fedi non-technical admin or organizer to see on this forum” is (a) changing the subject away from the original focus on Black people and (b) implying that the Black people who aren’t here are non-techincal, are new to fedi, and intimidated. No, they’re not intimidated, they just have better things to do than deal with stuff like this!
EDIT: another reply in this thread, after I made this post, is another even clearer example of changing the subject away from increasing Black participation here to increasing participation from other communities . So I did another polite call-in, suggesting it get moved to another thread. It’s a community that would be great to have more participation from, so a good suggestion in general, but not great in the context of this thread.
And also from the same comment, Bumblefudge’s question Are white latinos and puerto ricans “non-white” for these purposes? illustrates how complex this all is. There’s no way to know who this is referring to – maybe Bumblefudge is a white, latino and/or puerto rican and hinting at something important to his perspective, maybe it’s a reference to Jason, maybe it’s something else completely.
And different people might well have different answers to that very interesting question, which relates to the interactions between racism, ethnicity, colonialism, and colorism (which cuts in both directions)… And there are similar questions in other situations. Are Ashkenazi Jews with eastern european and russian heritage (like me, for example) white? I certainly see myself as white; other Ashkenazi Jews don’t see themselves that way; white supremacists sure as heck don’t see us as white.
In any case it’s a good reminder not to erase the existence of people who aren’t so easy to categorize. In one of my posts I was talking about apparent tensions between Black people and white trans women, and how Black trans people are invisibilized … somebody who read an early draft said “what about trans people who aren’t either Black or white?” Sure enough I had invisibilized them. It wasn’t bad intent on my part, but impact > intent … so I revised the post and try to keep it in mind going forward.
(And also that’s why my original topic in this post was specifically focused on Black people, and I phrased it as “almost complete” absence. There are in fact Black people in these forums – and elsewhere on the fediverse, it’s important not to erase them! And there are other people of color here as well, who are also marginalized in various ways, so it’s important not to erase them as well.)
As a follow-up to my first comment, on connecting with devs and admins from Asia, how do we make fediverse developer spaces like the FEP process, SocialHub, SocialCG, and SWF more welcoming to the people in this photo, and others like them?
That’s a great question too. It probably makes sense to move it to a topic of its own – I see that you also asked Praveen, which is a great idea, and that way you can collect the responses in a separate thread.
EDIT: Praveen’s response is similar to points made elsewhere in this thread:
Fedi developers will need to go to events like this and talk to people outside usual circles.