Mastodon's glorious Fediverse is having a day. Or rather, several days. You might want to skip this one if you're not feeling up to reading about racism or classism.
The instance I am on, Hachyderm, raised a lot of eyebrows in the Fediverse when it was temporarily defederated by several other instances over what can only be charitably called a difference of cultural beliefs. The woman who originally got Hachyderm off the ground left very abruptly and somewhat cryptically, her explanation of departure strewn over an hour-long livestream that really didn't clear up the issue for me at all, but that may be because I don't extensively engage with Mastodon like I do here, and so I probably missed out on a lot of the context.
Over the course of that day, however, a picture started to emerge of what really went down, and the tl;dr of it is that Hachyderm instituted a no fundraiser policy, which then picked open a lot of scabs as to the behaviour and values of Hachydermians in general, even at the upper echelons of leadership. Pretty cut-and-dry, eh? I wish! This problem extends far beyond Hachyderm's classist attitudes on fundraising...
The thing is, these problematic values aren't just unique to Hachyderm; they're endemic to the entire tech industry. I think all of us here have a pretty darn good idea of what that value system looks like, otherwise we wouldn't be here, but Capitalist apologia was something that even the founder engaged in (and rightfully was called out on). This isn't a great look, especially when most of our influx of new users are fleeing an oligarchical dipshit.
Speed-running Eternal September
The problem was made so much worse, because the backdrop of all of this was private invites going out for Twitter-alike Bluesky, brainchild of tech darling Jack Dorsey, a man that a lot of us understandably have a serious problem with. It was inevitable that a Fediverse-wide discussion was going to erupt over Mastodon vs. Bluesky, and one user decided to go the extra kilometer by pointing out that Black people felt safer on Bluesky than they did on Mastodon.
Guess how well that went over.
I don't know how things really are over on Bluesky. I don't have any drive to set up shop. I'm not going to beg for an invite. It's fair to say, though, that there's going to be a lot of wild speculation that doesn't match up with reality. I mean, look at Cohost's inception, and some of the absolutely Looney Tunes shit that was said about it.
Still, those of us who have been around for a while have a sense for these things. Everyone hits their Eternal September eventually no matter how pure the origin story, but some platforms are inclined to speedrun through the months to get there, so even while there's indications that moderation is happening in one form or another, it remains to be seen what exactly Bluesky will look like in five years, if it still exists, because the real test of moderation isn't in banning out-and-proud Nazis, it's dealing with the fuckers who use dog-whistles.
Why don't you use the block button?
I probably don't need to tell you that Mastodon has an exceedingly difficult problem with this, and tech-oriented instances get an extra helping. There's a very specific reason for this, and I like to call it "Free Speech Brainrot", this absolutely bizarre belief that all speech, no matter how abhorrent, has a place in humanity's discourse. There's even a weird sense that if one isn't pushing abhorrent speech, "freedom" isn't happening. Typically, this is thin-veiled bigotry that wants zero consequences for making life hell for others, but there are those who genuinely believe in some divine value of free speech: "Free speech! Free software! Open source! The Web wouldn't exist today if it was closed!" These people have the best intentions creating platforms that are engineered to support everyone's 'right' to say something, to share anything, because "information wants to be free," right?
...except that's completely antithetical to the protection of any kind of vulnerable minorities. It isn't even what Free Speech originally meant.
Free speech is a white person value. Spilling out from a very complicated European Enlightenment, it was enshrined in the American Constitution as a last-minute amendment designed to assuage the fears of a bunch of rich white land-and-slave owners. It was never intended for anyone in the working class, not even if you were a woman in the elite class, as evidenced by the fact that voting required one be a rich white male land owner. To comment on lofty ideals such as free speech, and then turn around immediately to restrict voting to the patriarchal elite says absolutely everything about where the American Founding Fathers were coming from. I dunno how else to tell you Americans that your Founding Fathers sucked ass.
And while through some bizarre happenstance the concept of free speech was let loose out of the elitist pen to roll around with the commoners, it is a concept whose very existence benefits a system of white supremacy, because only whites have any real shot at living in an idealized world where they aren't executed by cops for driving with a tail light out.
So anything white people construct, especially if they're from America, is built with the assumption that free speech and equality is only ever a good thing, everyone is on an equal footing, everyone's got a fair shot, and individuals are responsible for the content they consume.
Thus, we have software that "empowers" individuals. The very concept of social media is choosing who we subscribe to, choosing what we give a thumbs-up to, choosing who we boost, and choosing who we don't want to hear from. This capacity, to a neoliberal techfucker, is all a person needs, and why wouldn't it work for them? Chances are they're a white male, and it's working splendidly. They don't have to worry about the social media equivalent of being pulled over and shot.
But for the non-whites who do? "Why don't you use the block button? That's what it's there for." And if you're poor? "Why don't you just move to another instance that doesn't ban fundraising?"
I'm white, so I can't imagine what it's like to experience a parade of shitsticks telling me that Kloset Klanners who want me dead or in chains aren't a deal-breaker to have on a social media platform, and I should just ignore them. It can't be fun, though, and a place like Mastodon, a social media platform notorious for being difficult to use, already has a filter that preferentially selects for the more technically inclined who will harbor those ideals. It's a match made in Hell, and when moderation does have to happen, the solutions tend to be absurdly heavy-handed...
...like banning all fundraisers regardless of who is starting them or why? After all, equality is a divine value, right? Just like Free Speech. If we're going to punish something, we should punish everyone equally, rich or poor, white or Black.
Isn't that fair?
The Hot Take
When the solutions offered to rampant racism on a social platform are to dump the responsibility of defence onto the victims, or to segregate the victims into their own little instance; when the solution to corporate fundraising on a social platform is an equality-spirited blanket ban on fundraising no matter your income, the message is clear. Lofty ideals of free speech and equality mean more to white people than does the protection of people they have an immense advantage over. Moreover, they're practically trained since birth to have a visceral, repulsive reaction to anything critical of those ideal. "What if tyrants?!?!"
I come bearing some absolutely shocking-but-not-shocking news: the tyrants are already there for BIPOC and poor people, and they have been there for centuries, if not millennia.
I used to think white ideals of Free Speech and Equality were a Good Thing. I know better now. Some speech doesn't deserve to exist. Some visions of the future require a sacrifice on our part to realize. Some things must be treated as unequal in order to have any chance at justice. Some ideas had their time to shine in the "marketplace of ideas", and then proved to the entire world why they shouldn't be entertained. No one at a physics conference should feel obligated to platform perpetual motion cranks, and we shouldn't feel any obligation, either, to allow ideas we know are horrible to get enough sunshine to grow.
People will tell you that's tyranny. Oh well? Maybe life's just one big, eternal power struggle, but I can't see any other way to actually hold to a professed value of protecting minorities and the poor, because the fantasy world of freedom and equality still only exists for rich white people.
And if Mastodon as a whole loses what few BIPOC they have to crypto-dipshit Jack's Twitter clone, they'll have no one but themselves to blame (but they'll probably just blame Black people).