It's becoming more and more obvious that blocking is an incomplete solution. It sucks to see my friends have to post the shitty takes people bombard them with in order for me to even know they're being bombarded because I had previously blocked the shit take-havers. It feels victim-blamey to even say it because they shouldn't have to put up with this shit at all. And reporting is extremely imperfect on a site where one person does All the moderation on top of a host of other duties which are also time-sensitive. (That said, I rarely bother reporting on any site anymore because I'm just used to it not mattering*—this is not a good or healthy reason or mindset; yet another reason I don't weigh in on this stuff more granularly)
The fedi conversation on this as far as it relates to racists has basically been revolving around shared blocklists. I know the very idea will have Some Users on this site up in arms for reasons that range from valid to entirely dishonest and disingenuous. And yeah, there's no such thing as a perfect safety tool, there will always be vectors for intentional and unintentional misuse.
All I'll say is there's a reason and a context in which the saying "we keep us safe" exists, and both also apply here.
*a notable exception is my fedi instance, where instead the reason I don't report stuff is because 9.9999 times out of 10 my instance admin/mods beat me to it…and I believe it's because they generally keep up to date on the closest things fedi currently has to shared blocklists.
EDIT: This post has gone around a lot and I've also been getting more follows on mastodon from people I recognize here, which is cool, I am okay with this.
HOWEVER, none of this was supposed to be an endorsement of "the fediverse" in general in any way because fedi has the same bigotry/white nonsense/racists' playbook problem as cohost but it's bigger so there's statistically more of it (and the reply visibility issues make being able to protect each other as individual users at least as bad if not worse). If you are considering going to mastodon because of this post, PLEASE PLEASE read this followup I wrote first just so you know what you're getting into.