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alyaza
@alyaza
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jesncin
@jesncin

Aah I just got to read through this and learned I was mentioned! Thanks so much @alyaza for organizing and making sense of all this.

For the sake of archiving so it doesn't get lost, here's a post I made soon after being called a fragile picrew weirdo. I mentioned it in the comments of that post, but I had to deal with a lot of racist pushback to my Superman fan comic (where I received said "fragile picrew weirdo" comment) after posting it. I experienced racism across all platforms, here being no different.

I can't stress enough how tiring it is to exist online as a poc. As a Southeast Asian, I get to deal with being constantly infantilized online, only to be instantly judged as the Angry Brown Person the second I step out of that perception they made up about me. You can't tell poc to just not speak up about racism and lay low, because racism happens regardless of what we do. I had to deal with a person being rude about boundaries because they brought up image hosting. You can victim blame poc all you want for being "dramatic" or loud about bigotry, but the truth is just existing with any kind of respect for ourselves means inevitably dealing with racism.


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in reply to @alyaza's post:

Thanks for the writeup, hope you're able to take a bit of a breather after publishing.

Don't have much to add, aside from wanting this place to stay workable for me and others. Hope folks who read it can take it to heart. The perennial "white nonsense" backlash has happened to online social spaces I've been in at least three times now, before counting this one. I'm not optimistic enough to think it will ever be fully avoidable, but if the culture here can shift even marginally, it will be a material benefit

thank you for doing this, i've been here "a long time" (~early-mid 2022, I got invited a bit after the "friends and family" period) and yet a bunch of what happened in '23 didn't surface on my dashboard at all1, which might speak to how easy it is to "shield yourself" from that stuff and assume Everything Is Fine For Everybody 🙃


  1. It's also possible, and perhaps more likely that me silencing #cohost meta caused this. I have no issues with people discussing's the site culture/racism issues on that tag but I grow irrate at posts that boil down to bad faith discussions about more "material" things about the website because that's my career and I get pissy quickly about that stuff lol.

Extremely well put together chronicle about a ton of discourse with sound logic and plenty of receipts. I hope this gets spread all over the site so the people who aren't aware that this is going on can be made aware and take a look at their own shit and self-police rather than putting the pressure on minorities to do it for them. I know I missed a lot of this (I opened in early '24), so knowing the history is definitely opening my eyes to a lot of the more nuanced things my particular perception tends to miss. Thank you for writing this up <3

great post, i had more to say but i don’t think it adds anything this post doesn’t already cover way better.

what an exhaustive undertaking both in scope and labor, thank you. i still think your union news account, black history month, and theory reading posts are some of the most valuable and informative parts of this website and keeps it worth visiting. not sure what motivates you to keep it up, but I am very grateful.

I think it's by far the most egregious moderation failure the site has ever seen. It's one thing to maybe not look at all the details and thus mess up a moderation decision. But the egregious part was making a post to shame people for being upset about it, and having in language that's like "we're your friends you should trust us!" ASSC staff aren't my friends, I don't know them, and my trust in them is based on the decisions they make, and at the moment of that post my feelings about their decisions were pretty fucking low. Saying "how dare you not trust us" to the point of making the person you wronged with your moderation decision apologize to you was just wretched.

This is a great post. I think Cohost hiring minority mods would have an immediate helpful effect; it can be hard for people not often exposed to racism (read: a lot of white people, myself included) to understand why some less overt racist acts are harmful at a glance. Of course, that doesn't excuse anyone from educating themselves and listening to the people affected, but minority mods would be able to respond more quickly and decisively without explanations from the people affected by a specific action, who are already under strain from being, y'know, affected by racism towards them.

I understand this is well-meaning, and in the long-term, Cohost definitely needs to have POC empowered in leadership and decision-making, and also needs to invest deeply in community safety (both big challenges at Cohost's current scale) -- but please consider that consolidating both needs into one solution like you've suggested would mostly result in mod of color being exposed to a lot of concentrated racism (along with other potentially heinous/traumatizing things). Content moderation for Big Tech already has a huge problem of exposing (often marginalized) content reviewers to traumatizing material for poor wages and with very little material support.

was unaware of all of this going on here (i'm white, of course i was), so thank you for making me and people like me aware of just how centralized this website is around people like me (white queer nerds). cohost may feel safe and like home to me, but it's obvious there's work to be done for others to feel the same.

Well this sucks. I wish I had known about all this. Is there anything that I, as a white user, can do to help outside of reblogging this kind of stuff, reporting any racism I notice, and trying to not be racist? I'm not sure if I have the "right" to even ask this, and I'm sorry if it's offensive.

Is there anything that I, as a white user, can do to help outside of reblogging this kind of stuff, reporting any racism I notice, and trying to not be racist?

much ink (or keystrokes, if you will) has been spilled on contribute to antiracism on the internet as a whole, a lot of which will apply to cohost. a good place to start might be looking through (and clicking through) the linked opinions about racism on Mastodon, which, barring specific implementation details about federation, still include enough to paint a picture of the patterns of online racism and how it can fester in spaces (as well as how you can help fight it).

Good work on compiling all of this together into one source, you've done a fantastic job here at cataloging esp on a site where cataloging is made quite hard.

The only one of these I've seen personally across my feed was the one about the cozy game Orientalism (mainly because I joined in mid 2024). The violent reactions I saw other (presumably) white people have to being told that commercializing and asthetic-izing Japanese culture is racist was insane. Is it really so hard for these people to just fucking listen?

Again, thank you for compiling together this post. I didn't know about the previous issues the site has had regarding race (and was largely akf during the olympic games so that topic was buried in my feed by the time I came back), and this has been incredibly insightful.

I don't want to dig through my posts to try to remember if I made a post with this sentiment or if it was a reply to someone somewhere, but there is honestly a very specific thing where white leftists into nerd hobbies have a gigantic blind spot with Japan. I've seen people who will absolutely slam an American TV show for the most mild sexism on earth (and sometimes things that you have to really really stretch to call sexism), then watch full on harem animes made to sell plastic models to otaku guys in Japan. I've seen people who will spend all day talking about racism as a white ally, sometimes to the point where they 're ignoring what actual POC think about a specific thing, but then the second it's Japan? Suddenly it's samurai and idol girls and Totoro and being extremely weird to actual Japanese people because they think they're anime girls, and how dare you think anything is wrong with what they're doing? They're just appreciating the culture you see. If you did this with literally any other culture (except maybe Korean for some of them for the same reasons) they would yell at you, but if it's Japan they're all about it.

I studied in Japan for a year. I had classmates who just assumed our middle aged teachers would be up on the latest animes that air at 2am for 20-something otakus. American anime fans think everyone in Japan watches these animes when it's basically the same demographic of young adult nerds as watches them in the States. But they seriously were shocked to know our teachers didn't know about the latest harem anime or whatever because, well, they're Japanese, they MUST love anime! In reality one of them would rather talk about Twin Peaks than any other thing on TV and another was excited to hear I liked John Waters films because he watched Pink Flamingos in his college days lmao. It's almost like they're fucking people with diverse interests. But some people's brains break around Japan.

(First I missed like everything this whole os about because I generally stick to my own lil corner of cohost with the qtoid people but-)

I remember seeing a video of some American dude walking around Japan in Anime cosplay, not for an event - just walking around, and he got the same reaction he would in the west. People looked at him weird.

i get the feeling certain white people from another website are going to act Very Intelligent about all this (and i think there was probably space in this post for how what they are doing is also harmful to minorities but whatever) so let me preempt any of that by saying nobody onsite or off-site needed to get consent before compiling and posting about "discourses", that was not the main issue at hand, the main issue at hand was exporting discourse that had nothing to do with the people it was reaching as packaged popcorn to hem and haw over in a packaged that was explicitly "lol look at this bad other site full of silly white people!" (pot meets kettle etc) without any intention of contributing to the discussion in a productive way. i think it's debatable whether any of this is productive but that's besides the point. THAT was why people said "no, don't use my posts for this shit", because they didn't want to be part of something that insensitively took a discussion about race and made it about how cohost is a silly website full of miscommunication and broken telephones and its design facilitates certain community issues more than others (which is a premise i don't agree with, i think mastodon especially pre-qrt is a much better example of more broken telephones than the average social media, but even there, my experience with it had more to do with communities essentially acting in bad faith to all the communities around them and bragging about how much controversy they had caused that the broken telephones were a relatively minor factor in).

Ah yes, Notnull. Elsewhere in that conversation, sort of an "aunt" comment in the hierarchy to the one screencapped (I don't have a record of my own, just the notifs from their responses to me), I tried to explain Orientalism to them. They came back with a technical justification that implicitly assumed devs must have good reason to write gibberish Asian text. I tried to suggest that maybe as white people we don't have the same experience with our ancestral language being devalued, and I think I was able to convince them that one particular game was racist in how it treated Japanese language text, but I am unsure if the overall leson took root.

I shared an article about imperialism in game design in a small Discord server in 2021 (by one of the developers of Sable) and he came out of nowhere to aggressively argue semantics while completely missing the major points of the article. It was kind of the last straw for me wanting to have anything to do with him. Shocked but not surprised to see him crop up in this post. Given that it’s been three years and if anything he’s gotten worse, it seems pretty clear to me that he’s learned nothing and will likely continue to have zero self-reflection on racism, in my opinion for what it’s worth.

Yeah, it was a weird exchange. I was like "so what's being described here is the way this type of racism works" and he kept being like "well I don't see the problem, because this doesn't upset me" and... you can lead a horse to water, I guess.

I wanna add in a bit that's relevant, but I'm gonna have to preface that this isn't a rebuttal. I'm in agreement that there's a detrimental white air to cohost, and that this timeline is fairly accurate.

A huge amount of the discussion around racism I end up seeing on the english-language internet applies a lot of assumptions that are specific to current tensions and dynamics in most of the USA and Canada, but don't generally apply elsewhere and have exceptions in the USA and Canada that many aren't fully aware of.

Particularly, you see a lot of collapsing of various cultures into "white" when the ruling class prefers an ethnic group with light skin outside of asia. I don't personally know how applicable that is in the USA as I don't live there, but study on american racism I've read tells me it is likely extremely applicable.

The reason why this can create a problem is that it describes a specific cultural relationship in the USA that doesn't exist in the same form elsewhere, ie whereas in the USA being "white" qualifies you for political preference, and "white" is a very wide thing based primarily on skin colour and native language, elsewhere the requirements for political preference are typically more strict (eg. most americans could probably not quickly tell a group of poles from a group of brits, but brits can and being obviously-polish ends up marking you in britain). This can end up resulting in polling/visibility/reporting bias on the internet, since people who are visible minorities in the country where they live may end up being collapsed into "white" without more careful consideration.

But again, this is just given due to relevance to the subject. Thanks for this post. Apologies if this was rambly or seems like condescension, not my native language and general outward communication struggles, don't have time to endlessly revise.

Spent a little time reading this over in the car, and it's been a long time coming I suppose. I'm cautiously optimistic receipt capture here will be understood by target audience members to not be approval for harassment.

Something interesting here is the repeat instances of weaponized anonymous asks; particularly to pressure response, public comment, or otherwise bait targets into participation. I don't think I've seen this since the old Tumblr days (Pre 2018 purge), so the more things change, the more they stay the same.

I think I have other thoughts, but that's a long off opinion that is still forming. I often have to consult externally with POC I know through my other communities, which can be a long process of determining the nature of my deficit in understanding certain references.

Less speculatively speaking: I doubt any census run by Co-host would be psychometrically valid for adequate self-report of geo-ethno-national origin or cultural identity though. Demographers routinely smash their head against a wall about this topic over the word "Hispanic", I shudder to think of what standard of terminology a Co-host census would think to include.

adding to the pile of thanks for writing about this. i've seen ppl on my feed have conversations about these conversations for a while. the context you provide is necessary, and appreciated.
it must have been a deeply unpleasant experience to put this post together, but i hope some part of writing it was cathartic for you.

thanks for the great write up. I find it difficult to decide whether to be optimistic or pessimistic given how close we are to staff's moderation change announcement and how much damage has already been done, but I really hope they can get it right before public backlash from now on and this comes to be known as a poor start that cohost recovered from, rather than being another social media site that gets comfortable with hosting racism

heya, i know what i will say first is not related directly to cohost but:
i've seen some people, for example a friend of mine, make music and art dedicated to a very idealized version of 80s and 90s japanese culture based on things like city pop, future funk, etc.
most people just see it as harmless fun but sometimes i wondered if that idealization meant that a great deal of people didn't listen to what japanese people actually have to say about their lives, the culture they're part of, those who actually lived in these times and period that happens to be so romanticized and not depicted well, etc.
like idk, the idea of reducing a whole group of people, a significant period of their history, their culture, etc into just "haha funny a e s t h e t i c" is something that on closer observation might be some form of orientalism.

It definitely is, the whole city pop/vaporwave/cyberpunk aesthetic stuff is absolutely TEEMING with orientalism. And God back when I listened to a lot of 80s jpop on Spotify I got recommended a bunch of white artists who did "city pop" but it was literally just 80s jpop hits that had BARELY been altered in any way, like maybe slightly bass boosted at most, not even enough to call them remixes...so pretty much just stealing work from Japanese artists and going "I made this".

as the resident 80s Jpop Special Interest Person that shit really pisses me off. vaporwave can be so bad about this

there’s a particular vaporwave album cover i stumbled across once that is literally just an 80s jpop album cover but with the artists face blanked out. i recognized it right away, i don’t remember what the vaporwave thing was anymore but the cover art was from an album by chisato moritaka. they just ripped the cover and basically crossed her out. it made me so mad. but also, talk about being on the nose for what vaporwave is like sometimes

I might be putting my foot terribly in my mouth here but I imagine that a lot of orientalism can be avoided by extracting the essence of the graphic design and sensibilities of 80s and 90s Japanese futurism/whatever without structuring what you make around it being 80s and 90s Japanese retrofuturism. I don't think there's anything wrong with being really into outdated world music from a particular country so long as you don't wade into fetishizing it or using it as a brand or liking it because of where it's from. And I'm fucking all about the abstract graphic styles that music is associated with and don't think they've aged a bit. I think it can be a problem when you intentionally leave them referentially stuck in the 80s and 90s and cover them in kanji and anime and cherry blossoms and old cars rather than giving them new life. Hopefully I'm not talking like a fool here.

I appreciate you taking the time and effort to put this extremely comprehensive post together.
I feel like I was missing a lot of context here and seeing it all together helps me understand the gravity of the situation a lot more.

it was surreal seeing that "kitsune tails" game on my dash completely uncritically RIGHT after the whole orientalism discussion took over cohost for a while. especially when its one of the most cliche White Orientalist Indie Games i have ever seen. was there ever any thread/discussion about that because i would love to read it

Kitsune Tails is made by a Cohost user. Given that, I think if it were a big offender somebody would have said something. I'd rather an Asian speak here but I see it as less a game "co-opting" (which might be too strong a word given how mild the initial criticism of the other two games was) Japanese aesthetics and presenting them in an overly cutesifying way, and more a game that is actually just about Japanese tropes. Minami Lane is not a very Japanese game in character and in fact does not even look that Japanese (unless I'm only familiar with Tokyo which is a very real possibility). Usagi Shima is blatantly cashing in on Neko Atsume and "omg kawaii!!". KT is inspired by Japanese culture mostly by way of old NES games, but it uses what appears to be a decently fleshed out setting rather than doing the concepts of Japanese lore that it uses a disservice by trivializing them, and in that way arguably goes deeper than a surface level tribute, which may be more respectful. It does not seem overly indulgent in anime cliches or kawaii uguu yuri shit to tell its queer story. Again though my opinion here is worth relatively little.

Thank you for taking the time to put this together. As someone who uses this website on and off I didn't know about most of these incidents. I appreciate seeing posts like this trying to keep a record of events and push for more accountability from both the staff and users of this site.

yeah and thanks, renkon's "here's my meltdown, White people collect your trash" part makes me realize some of the ways poc in my life get less grace then they should from others in my life, in the past I've gone to bat for them when it becomes a overt conflict but i think i need to be more proactive and i should make more of a point in explicitly telling other white people to not start overt conflict with poc over minor things and instead extend grace.

sometimes i worry about this not being the place to say stuff like the pervious coment but thinking about it if i was getting hatefully asks about being autistic or trans or whatever i think i would prefer some stuff that is at least trying to be anti-ableism like how my comment here is trying to be anti racism, ether way i think cohost mods need to view not banning a rascist/waiting a week or two more then they needed to as a failing more then they do even if it doesn't lead to the same lvl of overt backlash a false positive might lead to

i haven't seen most of this stuff (joined around 5 months ago, so i'm relatively new). wwwow.
the fact that this has been happening is a massive shame. i moved to cohost from tumblr because of the promise of a much more inclusive and diverse community. i've referred to it as such when recommending it, even.

Oh man, thanks so much for this chronicle!
Had to read it in four sittings but finally got through it - that'd be too many "wow that's fucked up" to experience all one after another.

I've been a passing witness to posts from all mentioned incidents, but it was always kinda difficult to piece together a full understanding of what happened (from perspective of someone not involved in any of this) due to how cohost posts and search work.
Thanks for your hard work on putting it together in one place like this 💜

thank you for compiling all of this. it is really difficult to see the entire picture on here as you said, i've only ever been able to find bits and pieces. i'm sorry that this was even necessary. i really hope this community as a whole can reject this crap and people of color can feel safe and enjoy their time here the same as anyone else. this place has a lot of potential but that can only be realized if anyone can participate without being pushed out. and that includes being able to have anonymous asks open without worrying some racist shithead is going to harass them because they dared to not keep quiet about their treatment here.

All social media platforms should, at the very least, have private messages/asks disabled by default from people you aren't following/friended. Only offering the option to enable privates messages/asks from users you aren't following/friended somewhere in the settings for those that aren't part of a demographic where getting harassed is the awful norm.

finally was able to sit down and read this and i wanted to add my thanks and appreciation to the pile!! i missed a lot of this somehow despite being on the site (which is on me) but good fucking god there's... a Lot here.

the sheer suffocating white resistance to criticism and change has been a hugely major factor in what has driven me away from this space. Every time conversations like this come up, it seems like most of the cohost userbase ia more concerned with covering their own ass or defending cohost itself than actually listening to criticisms and accepting that something needs to change.

I'm white as fuck and this website is routinely way too white for me to tolerate for long. It'd be nice if cohost's staff and users alike could actually buck up and do something about the continuous racism this place demonstrates, but I guess that'd just be "too risky" for their little white queer techie utopia hangout space.

Count me in with the cynics. The dominant culture here is one that consistently fears rocking the boat more than it believes in doing something that is both right and uncomfortable. The staff only ever seem to meaningfully act when harassed into it, and any opposition to the dominant culture is always, always decried as pointless, shitstirring, or hypocritical - whatever makes it go away the fastest so the comfy whites can get back to pretending they're the pioneers of the greatest leftist social media on earth.