Feedback welcome! Here’s the TL;DR list
- Listen more to more Black people
- Post less – and think before you post
- Call in, call out, and/or report anti-Blackness when you see it
- Support Black people and Black-led instances and projects
Other suggestions?
Just going off of the TL;DR (sorry) …
I feel like #1 could be expanded to “actively plug in to some black voices”. Which then, IMO, connects back to some principles about being a good fedi-citizen and how that requires having an awareness of how well the network as a whole is functioning.
The amount of people that have not even heard the discourse BIPOC are having about the fediverse … but are also fedi or masto-advocates who advertise the quality of mastodon over twitter and are invested in this “truth” … well I suspect it’s way too high.
I just had a conversation with some such person the other day … they were completely oblivious to all of the discussions that have occurred the past week or so and effectively sea lioning about it and the possibility that X/Twitter could be better for BIPOC while simultaneously talking about how much safer/better mastodon is.
I’m not BIPOC or an activist or anything … I just follow some BIPOC who talk about this stuff. Some I follow because they’re cool. Some because I want to hear what they say about issues. It really isn’t hard. Going beyond “just listening” doesn’t require much … just search some people out, follow and read a bit. I’d argue, if you care about the network, that there’s a moral imperative to plug into the diversity of the network, even just a little bit here and there (because it’s reasonable to find controversial/difficult topics overwhelming).
The amount that aren’t doing that is problematic in its own right I’d say.
Thanks. Yes, I agree that it’s problematic that a lot of people don’t see anything from Black people in their timelines – or do, but don’t pay any attention to it. But, there are also a lot of people who follow a handful of the most prominent Black fediversians – folks like Mekka and Timnit – and nobody else, and tht’s problematic too. So “listen more to more people” tries to cover both.
And the full article has a paragraph