Feedback welcome! Here’s the TL;DR list

  1. Listen more to more Black people
  2. Post less – and think before you post
  3. Call in, call out, and/or report anti-Blackness when you see it
  4. Support Black people and Black-led instances and projects

Other suggestions?

59 points

This is all hard to do because it is hard to determine people’s race on lemmy. Some usernames give it away but most don’t. And I don’t go snooping trough their post history to find that out.

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20 points

Yeah, the section on “Listen more to Black people” didn’t really cover the challenges on Lemmy. I added this:

If you’re on a platform like Lemmy which doesn’t yet have similar hubs, it’s more challenging. One option is to use other social networks, news aggregators, and search engines to find articles, papers, and videos by Black people – and post them yourself to help others listen.

How’s that?

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57 points
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55 points
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20 points

No, “color blindness” perpetuates structural racism. Here’s one study looking at that. Seeing Race Again Countering Colorblindness across the Disciplines has a lot more, although it’s focused on law and academia.

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20 points

Color blindness perpetuates structural racism. On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a goldfish.

There’s the cultural issues, but those aren’t limited to African Americans vs White Americans on the Internet.

Your rules should apply to everyone, including those two groups. The trickier part is dealing with privilege.

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8 points
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6 points
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3 points
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2 points
Deleted by creator
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46 points

We’ve removed some of the comments in this thread for expressing the exact racist sentiments which would warrant this type of post and for arguing in bad faith. This is a perfectly salient conversation to be having in this community so we will be leaving this thread up, but as a reminder, please engage in good faith and be nice. If you don’t want to have conversations about anti-racism in Technology then I suggest you unsubscribe from this community and others on Beehaw.

On a personal note: I would be absolutely thrilled to see more, better discussions of the intersections of areas like race, gender, and sexuality with technology, and fewer arguments about which Linux distro is better.

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18 points

I was surprised to see the tone of response I saw in here. I always thought of beehaw as an inclusive instance.

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27 points

I agree completely. We do work hard to keep things inclusive and nice™ on Beehaw, but Technology is our largest and most active community by a fair margin, and sometimes folks don’t respect the vibe on the instance when they comment - either because they don’t realize what instance the post is on, or because they don’t understand or maybe don’t care to understand the ethos of the instance.

We’ve done some cleanup in the thread, but removals can take time to federate (if they federate at all, which is not guaranteed in my experience. Hopefully the discussion from here out will be more inclusive, but we’ll be keeping a closer eye on the thread in any case.

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20 points
*

I always thought of beehaw as an inclusive instance.

most of the issue is and has always been off-instance users, who for a variety of reasons (some intentional, some because of UI/user experience/just plain unawareness due to the nuances of federation) tend to respond to threads like these in ways that our on-instance users don’t. to combat this we may or may not switch to a whitelist in the future instead of a blacklist, which is what we have now; if that occurs, it will probably be when we move to Sublinks

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9 points

switch to a whitelist in the future instead of a blacklist

Phrasing?

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13 points
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Absolute nonsense. Many of the comments you removed weren’t saying anything wrong. They were discussing why the OPs draft is unworkable and would have the opposite of the effect they intend.

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19 points

there are difficulties but bluntly: these are only “unworkable” if you’re dismissive (as your comment here is) and/or make absolutely no effort to make them work. you are largely vindicating the need for such a list.

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7 points
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Again, total nonsense. I’ll repeat exactly what i said in one of the comments you deleted, and YOU can tell me why it’s wrong. On lemmy there’s no way to know what race/gender/sexuality a person is. So, you tell me, how is any of this stuff applicable here? If OP was just talking about mastodon, then their title is completely wrong, because their title is specifically saying how to change the fediverse, not how to change mastodon.

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11 points

Other commenters provided feedback that was given in good faith. Those replies were left up. I hope you can see why we might consider jumping straight to comparing the poster to Hitler when you disagree with their well intentioned post about how to better be anti-racist on Fediverse communities to be a bit problematic.

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Thanks very much for wading in!

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17 points

In the context, the author isn’t saying “you should reduce your whole Fediverse activity”. It’s more like “when talking about this stuff, if you aren’t black, think before you say something. And you probably don’t need to say it, it’s better to shut up”.

It’s sensible advice even if worded poorly.

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Technology

!technology@beehaw.org

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A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.

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