This is the last thing I'm going to say on that place:
Black people, women, trans people, and disabled people should not have to hide ourselves to avoid harassment.
If you don't want us blocking and avoiding your nazi-land en masse, if you don't want your software to be associated with nazis, come up with ways to stop the nazis from harassing us rather than crying TO US about your precious software.
Give us some confidence in your software's ability to not be abused by nazis. Duh.
"just updated your code to--"
what you NOT gon do is tell my black ass to learn to code, understand code, understand servers, and host my own allow-only instance on my own time and dime because you're to lazy to fix the shit yourself
*flips my hair and walks away*
ooo chile the foolishness
"it's not my responsibility to fix this so you're comfortable"
well then your whole instance and everything associated with you is getting blocked, simple.
don't host and admin a community if you're too lazy to... admin.
and with that, i am going to watch queer eye and draw some shit
Addendum: Yes, I know, not all users. However while there remains an imbalance of interactions and information (i.e. why can I only see bits and pieces or nothing at all from them and they can raid my shit?) , no transparency, no clarity about moderation tools, and no digestible information about what the fuck this is, I'm going to continue to treat it like nazi-land. Stay pressed.
I feel like I'm fighting ghosts sometimes. Like "can yall see this shit too or????"
@guerrillablack Big mood @ basically every dev I've crossed paths with even briefly.
Why isn't adjusting for harassment and other abuse part of stress-testing a project? Why isn't proofing it against these misuses a part of COMPLETING a release?
(Rhetorical, obv. Abuse = ✨engagement✨ so abuse targets are just... the assumed price of a monetizeable startup.)
@guerrillablack It’s not just the neo-Nazis, but also the Klan wannabes and the idiots who show off how woke thy are by declaring “no unacceptable tactics, only incorrect targets”, and the islamophobes, and… (you get the idea)
@guerrillablack
"Please, can you make something about those users? They are nazis and want to hurt us."
"It's not my place to do that. We allow free speech here."
"I understand. But in this case, I'm going to have to silence your whole instance."
"YOU'RE SO MEAN. WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS TO ME. YOU'RE THE REAL FASCIST HERE."
@guerrillablack There is no technical solution that will make a piece of software unusable to nazis. There are ways to implement moderation so those who don't want nazis can keep them out, and of course there can and should be fairly strict moderation on the flagship instance to help shape the culture, but even with perfect moderation tools there's nothing stopping Stormfront setting up their own instance. This is why instance-level blocking exists.
@guerrillablack (There probably is some room for better tools allowing users to shape their own timelines though. For one, someone really needs to write a frontend to the filters that doesn't require knowing regular expressions... maybe I'll take a crack at it, though my software skills are somewhat lacking these days)
It is a trend in the online world to blame people of color, trans people, women, and disabled people for pointing out how hostile your shit is to us. It's not our fault.
Don't cry to us about how the assholes ruined this for you.
Make your shit unusable for assholes. Take it out on them.
Stop your tears and put in some damn work.