In 4 things white people can do to start making the fediverse less toxic for Black people (DRAFT!) and its cross-posts, quite a few people said things like “maybe racism is a problem on Mastodon, but I don’t see it on Lemmy.” Of course, plenty of comments in the various threads were in fact examples of racism on Lemmy, so one takeaway is that at lot of people don’t see racism even when they’re looking at it. And helpful commenters pointed out some of the other patterns of racism on Lemmy. … but that wasn’t really the thrust of that discussion.

So I wanted to ask more generally, what are some of the examples you’ve seen of racism on Lemmy? Quotes and links are great, but also feel free just to describe examples or call out more general patterns!

  • 🅿🅸🆇🅴🅻
    2•3 months ago

    I follow your blog from time to time and I appreciate it. Just with your recent posts I realized you have an active Lemmy account.

    I was going to continue this comment with “But I don’t get…”, then I stopped and read your blog post again and remembered rule #2.

    I think I get what you are trying to say, it’s good that there are some mod tools to help with modding, but they’re not enough, and even if racism isn’t as visible on Lemmy, people targeted by racism still exist and get hurt. So I guess your point is be more proactive than reactive. People don’t get that, and even if they are well intentioned, they think of all the defederating and banning examples as “good enough”.

    Early adopters are also overprotective with Lemmy and its small community, especially when a newcomer directly questions “how is racism in this community?”. They found their peaceful corner of the internet (relative to major social media platforms), they know it has its flaws, but since the beginning they had to defend to questions like “who owns the data?”, “what happens with deleted posts / comments”, “is defederatation effective”, “what about that Lemmygrad which is hosted by Lemmy developers”, can mods and admins become too powerful", “how long till this gets the same fate as Reddit”, etc.

    I’m not defending the behaviour, just thinking of an explanation. Because frankly, I’m also surprised by the downvotes and backlash you received.

    So I guess what I was trying to say is, “Hi Jon! Keep up the good work!”