Behaviour in the Fediverse, especially non-Mastodon behaviour, of which you probably don't know that it's inherently racist; CW: long (over 4,200 characters), Fediverse meta, Fediverse beyond Mastodon meta, mansplaining, reply guys, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, queerphobia, ableism, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, anti-Judaism, xenophobia
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So I've just learned the other day that curating your timeline/stream according to your personal interests and/or the topic of your account/channel is utterly racist. No matter how specialised your account/channel is.
Everyone in the Fediverse is basically
required to follow a substantial amount of Black users, especially Black activists. If you're on Hubzilla or (streams),
you must actually follow them, i.e. you must give them full permissions to send you anything and everything unhindered and unlimited. You must
not use account/channel-wide or per-contact filters on them. Even if each one of them boosts 100 posts per day, you must
not filter or disallow their boosts.
Also, if you're on Friendica, Hubzilla or (streams), all of which count and list unread messages, you must
not simply mark what has come in from them as read. You must read it all and be interested in it all. This includes all comments on these posts. And yes, you must re-read everything whenever it tries to catch your attention again, e.g. if someone has liked/faved or boosted/reposted/renoted/repeated it.
But even if you receive thousands of comments along with those hundreds of extra posts,
you must not comment on these comments. Not unless either a comment mentions you explicitly, or you're mutually connected to whoever wrote the comment. As you wouldn't even receive that comment on Mastodon, replying to it counts as reply-guying and mansplaining on Mastodon, completely regardless of
how you comment. It's highly disrespectful, and if Black people are involved, it's racist.
It doesn't matter if this has allegedly been perfectly normal, the standard and part of the culture since five and a half years before Mastodon was launched. Mastodon rules supreme over the whole Fediverse, and only Mastodon's culture has any validity anywhere in the Fediverse. Any culture that differs from Mastodon's is toxic and evil and must be abolished.
Speaking of which, let's suppose you come across one of these many threads in which Black Mastodon users talk with other Black Mastodon users and Mastodon-using allies about how the Fediverse needs to be made safer. In this case, no matter how blatantly obvious it is that all people involved in this thread have no idea of the Fediverse outside Mastodon, you are
not allowed to chime in and tell them about places which are safer due to their technological design and how they work.
First of all, it'd be mansplaining and reply-guying. Second, there's a tendency for Black Mastodon users to trust the rest of the Fediverse even less than Mastodon, what with e.g. Nazi instances on Pleroma. And third, your suggestion is likely to be taken for an attempt at nudging them into moving to one specific place, essentially trying to hoard them in a ghetto and segregate them from the rest of the Fediverse. In short, there's letting them wait for the Mastodon instances they're on to improve, and there's racism.
While we're at it: Even if you're on Friendica, Hubzilla or (streams), and you hate Mastodon with a burning passion for very good reasons, you must support Black-led Mastodon instances. Otherwise you're a racist.
Lastly, while I don't have proof for it, I'm pretty sure that everything that counts as racism towards Black users may also count as
- racist towards everyone else who isn't white
- sexist towards everyone who isn't cis-male
- homophobic towards everyone who isn't heterosexual
- transphobic towards trans people
- generally queerphobic towards everyone who isn't cisgender
- ableist towards disabled people, no matter what else you do to include them
- Islamophobic towards Muslims
- anti-Semitic/anti-Judaist towards Jews
- and generally hostile and xenophobic towards all marginalised minorities anywhere in the Fediverse.
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