cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/5257349

Fore some times, mastodon has been unsafe for black and other minorities users, the peoples impacted by this have been complaining about it openly, emphasizing the lack of good moderation tools to make instances safer. The s on the dev team and userbase however have essentially plugged their ears and refused to listen, and instead engaged in bad faith, tone policing, minimizing racism, dismissing the testimony of black users, and telling them to “curate their experience better” with filters and blocks (even though a big part of the complaint is that this doesn’t work).

Seeing this, some black peoples who have been complaining about racism on mastodon and the lack of security features to deal with it have taken things in their own hands and made a fork of Mastodon named Awujo.

A relevant thread by @tillshadeisgone@blackqueer.life (admin of a black queer instance who has been very vocal about racism on mastodon and has received a lot of backlash for it, go check their account for more threads on the subject)

“A Case for Community” a very short essay written by Awujo founder @are0h@h-i.social about the project

@are0h@h-i.social self introduction post

@are0h@h-i.social’s acount

  • blobjim [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    17·
    2 months ago

    I don’t feel like a fork of Mastodon would be successful unless they can pull enough people away from the main project.

    I’d also be wary of giving them money when they don’t even have a public repository yet.

      • blobjim [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        19·
        2 months ago

        I’m talking about development of the code. “Maintaining federation” means pulling in most of the changes from the main Mastodon sources, and they said it’s a “hard fork”, so it seems like they’re going to be creating a lot of work for themselves. It would have to get a lot of support for the devs to not just get burned out or demotivated if a bunch of the work is just maintaining compatibility.