It really is the social media equivalent of white folks telling Black folks that Boston is less racist than the South, and completely ignoring any Black folk that live in Boston or anywhere else in the US trying to talk about what their real, lived, experiences have been.

Many Mastodon users are just completely convinced of the superiority of their moderation philosophy, and they are as happy to ignore the few Black Fedi users in 2023 as they were in 2017.

I'm not interested in having Fedi 'splained to me. I'm just saying why more Black folk are on BlueSky:

1. It should be almost impossible for a new, non-technical user to onboard onto the Fediverse and accidentally join a server where they will receive racist death threats.

2. It should not be possible for racists to reply to a Black user's post with hateful gore images, without other users on the server knowing it.

3. It should be easy for a new admin to default into a safe, general denylist.

This isn't an exhaustive list, but these 3 are fairly straightforward ones. And they're not new. You can seriously find Black users asking for these going back to 2017.

Even trying to discuss these often results in:
* You just don't know how the Fediverse works!
* Shared deny lists can be abused, so let's never have them!
* You just love Twitter! You want quote tweets! You want Elon to hurt you again!

So Black Fediverse users tend to self-select into one of a few buckets:

1) Kinda Stubborn (AKA, this isn't my 1st racism): Willing to stay until things improve. People like me, @BlackAzizAnansi etc.

2) Super Stubborn (AKA, I will change you!): Willing to stay and fight the tide of the whole Fediverse for as long as it takes to fix things. @Are0h etc.

3) Normal People (AKA, life is too short): They just leave the Fediverse. This is most Black folk.

The "3s" are going from Twitter to BlueSky.🤷🏿‍♂️

@BlackAzizAnansi @Are0h

If you take one thing from my little thread here it's this: Black people don't leave the fediverse because of openly racist people.

Just like Black people don't leave Boston or San Francisco because of the openly racist people. There are openly racist people everywhere.🤷🏿‍♂️

Black people leave the fediverse, Boston, and San Francisco, because of the behavior of the supposed "non-racist" people. The combination of extreme racism, and denial of its existence, is too much.

@BlackAzizAnansi @Are0h
This cannot be stressed enough.

I have been kicked out of multiple message boards (back in the days before social media) because calling literal white supremacists "racist" was deemed a "personal attack" by the supposedly non-racist white liberal moderators.

I got a 24-hour ban from YouTube because "Trump is scared" was deemed "hate speech."

I'm getting tired of people who are more concerned about the feelings of racists than their victims' lives.