but ugh our luck is so bad with the fediverse, not without reasons. part of me want to go for a Pleroma account just to be cheeky, and on account of the very ambitious name ~Chara
- they/them
plural system in Seattle, WA (b. 1974)
lots of fictives from lots of media, some horses, some dragons, I dunno. the Pnictogen Wing is poorly mapped.
host: Mx. Kris Dreemurr (they/them)
chief messenger and usual front: Mx. Chara or Χαρά (they/them)
other members:
Mx. Frisk, historian (they/them)
Monophylos Fortikos, unicorn (he/him)
Kel the Purple, smol derg (xe/xem)
Pim the Dragon, Kel's sister (she/her)
like...given the situation we're in with respect to social media, i.e. completely inured to corporate run sites where the expectation is that the corporation's bureaucracy takes care of all the organization and complaints and so forth...the neverending tire fire that is "federated" social media, where it's constant civil war between instances, might be unavoidable.
still...ugh. there's got to be some better way of doing things, right?
~Chara
Posted this
current status: thinking of the fediverse as a kind of gnosticism, a hermetic (secret/occult/anti-public) discipline whose soteriology (model of salvation) specifically rejects broad inclusivity in favor of a small community of destined chosen
and got the response, I swear to god, "In what ways is the #fediverse not #inclusive ?"
People of color, especially Black folks, have been explaining for literally years the ways in which the fediverse culture is often hostile and racist, for example.
But in more abstract terms, fediverse best practices (like "join a well-moderated small instance") don't scale well to large groups of newcomers. There are significant barriers to finding a "home" here, especially for marginalized people. It's kind of like finding a job, or a therapist, lol.
There is a tendency of folks (including the best folks) on the fediverse to tend their own gardens rather than building a space that is actively welcoming to new people, especially when those people don't already match the existing culture and don't have an "in" with a specific community.
"go host your own if you're so ungrateful" (followed by stubborn refusal to acknowledge how inaccessible that really is to most people)
honestly? I'm a cheeky [expletive deleted] so I'll just come out and say it: undue pride in the "decentralized" nature of the fediverse reminds me exquisitely of cryptocurrency sales pitches about "decentralization". there's atomization in both systems, sure, but that atomization hasn't actually solved any underlying problems.
~Chara of Pnictogen