Even though millions of people left Twitter in 2023 – and millions more are ready to move as soon as there’s a viable alternative – the fediverse isn’t growing.1 One reason why: today’s fediverse is unsafe by design and unsafe by default – especially for Black and Indigenous people, women of color, LGBTAIQ2S+ people2, Muslims, disabled people and other marginalized communities.
wait what??~~ what??!! the fediverse has been nothing less than supportive of a lot of these marginalised groups. as soon as I saw the headline my jaw dropped. where.is.your.evidence.?
If you read the article and follow the links you’ll find plenty of evidence. The Whiteness of Mastodon, A breaking point for the queer community, and Dogpiling, weaponized content warning discourse, and a fig leaf for mundane white supremacy are three places to start.
ok, but what about the fact that most of the instances have policies meant to protect these groups, which happens to be most of them if not all of them? Since it is a federated service alot of the instance most users use, will usually defederate from other instances not moderating to their standards once they are aware, but sadly not all of them. That’s the point of federation so that one person can’t control every single detail of what happens for their own gains. That’s why the users on Mastodon broke away from Youtube, Twitter and Facebook.
Sure there are going to be instances that just so happen to exist that might not moderate for or even, appreciate these groups as much, at that point if you were to sign up to such an instance, you might want to switch instances to avoid such content.
Would I go as far as to say, that it is unsafe by design? No i’d say that the fediverse is meant to be safer by design for all people from all sorts of backgrounds with different viewpoints. and depending on where you join, then that will determine how safe the fediverse is for you as a person.
Did you know that if you find an instance that’s not within your local instance while prowsing and searching say Mastodon, that you can block that instance from showing up entirely?
also that marginalized groups of people had even had better experiences on the fediverse than on Twitter and other places as some seem to even claimed on your own post here.
What marginalised groups? I can assure you Black people wee not included in that group