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

  • Tabitha ☢️[she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
    20·
    2 months ago

    FOSS conceived as an exercise in collective ownership is a lie. Instead of large companies, FOSS is ruled by a collection of petty tyrants

    I noticed day one that mastadon/lemmy’s code is basically feudalism (I am a serf on hexbear), the thing that was democratized was that anyone can become a feudal lord, and any serf can leave for another feudal lord. Neither perfect nor democracy, but in some strange technical sense, an improvement, maybe?

    • CyberSyndicalist [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
      10·
      2 months ago

      leaning too hard on “code is law” here. The code is run on a sever which is a tool that can be managed by people in whatever social context they decide. Just as for example a bus is not necessarily a feudal system even if it can only be driven by the person with the key with everyone else along for the ride, if for instance it is a bus belonging to an organization which communally decides who drives it and where.

      Most existing fediverse servers may presently be fairly described as feudal but that’s not something that I think must be addressed in code. It’s up to people to form organizations that run fediverse servers democratically (some already are) and to promote this as the fediverse ideal.

    • hypercracker [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      9·
      2 months ago

      You’re correct in some sense that in the digital realm there is no scarcity for most things (despite the attempts of the cryptocurrency people to create scarcity artificially). The only scarce resource left is reputation. And people use names to attach their reputation assessments to. So a given fork (name) of a project becomes imbued with more scarce reputation than the others, and control over this scarce resource becomes a source of power in an otherwise utopian world.