You'd have to be around Mastodon to know what that means, but basically there was an effort by some Black folks there to not just create their own server but to also flag and identify racist/toxic servers etc, and anyone who fit that as they saw was put on their thing called "The Bad Space."
Was it well meaning? Yes. Did it end up being childish, overblown and power-trippy? Also yes.
I find that most everyone on Mastodon focuses properly, but too much on "Black people aren't much into Mastodon because of the racism," and not "Black people aren't much into Mastodon because it's boring as hell."
> Did it end up being childish, overblown and power-trippy?
Very often what any group outside the mainstream does do to address their concerns is called 'overblown', etc. by people in the mainstream. 'They make too big a deal of it', you'll hear. The 'overblown' perception is a strong signal of the problem at work (and also condescending).
It goes to what is often the heart of the cause of the problems: The mainstream doesn't experience it directly, they only see it peripherally, and they can easily ignore it, which they mostly do. Doing anything effective about the problem therefore challenges the mainstream's norms.
If you are studying Ada programming, you talk to Ada programmers, not to people who read about Ada somewhere - the latter would be absurd; what do they know? If you want to know about the experiences of Black people, conservative Christians, etc., you need to talk to those people and listen to them. It's not overblown to them.
A good principle in theory, but did you miss that I mentioned that I am black as well?
And on one hand I understand that for very many issues, black folks get unfairly percieved as making too big of a deal of things etc.
But no, I'll stand firm here. The Bad Space people are genuinely a bunch of weirdos. So much so that I feel compelled to call them out as such because I understand that for a lot of Mastodon, they're a point of contact for "Blackness" for a lot of people who are not black. And frankly, I find them embarrassing in a way that I literally never have ANY other black folks in real life. I do not want non-black people to believe that their behavior is normal or appropriate.
As in, I never found "oh, they're just playing the race card" to EVER be valid.
I don't know that it gives too much legitimacy to the argument. There are ~~ 40 million black people in the US; lots of different ideas and perspectives. If I went by all the black people who try to shock me by saying they like Trump, he would have gotten 70% of the black vote. Frankly, lots of people online claim to be black after they say something critical - and especially something racist (you didn't say anything racist, afaik) - as if that somehow justifies it. It's a well-worn troll tactic to turn the tables on racism, etc.
> And frankly, I find them embarrassing in a way that I literally never have ANY other black folks in real life. I do not want non-black people to believe that their behavior is normal or appropriate.
Doesn't that take on the too common perspective toward black people (and lots of other groups), that each black person is like a spokesperson of a universal Black Persons Association and speaks for / represents every other black person?
Freedom is the freedom to be outrageous, wrong, disagreeable, etc. (Not that disagreeing with you or me is 'wrong'.) Look at what white people do.
Yeah, basically I agree with mmooss. As a Black person, I don’t really care how weird, wrong, creepy, or exhausting other Black people are, I still feel more kinship and alignment with them than a random white person I don’t know. I can’t really stand white people writ large, but there are a ton of individual white people I love and adore. Because I know the difference between whiteness* and a white person.
And yes, I can say that, because white people aren’t impacted in a significant, systematic way by my statement about white people as a whole being used to shape policy and practice across Western society. And no, the very brief moment in which white men had to think twice before saying racist things doesn’t count, nor does affirmative action, of which white women were the primary benefactors.
And I don’t worry how non-Black people perceive those annoying and exhausting Black people, because if I can treat white folks individually after the shit I’ve been through, white folks can learn how to treat Black folks like individuals, and if they can’t they weren’t my kind of people anyway.
I tend to agree -- but what kept me around that particular flavor of Black mastodon bullshit was of course, not the people -- but my personal belief that Mastodon is the smartest model for social media, and as such I choose to try to see what I can do in there. I think the world would be better off if everyone saw/believed that the thing we do with twitter would work VERY WELL if done on Mastodon.
It's not an "argument?" And if anything it's just more of a confirmation of your exact idea of being against a universal Black Person's Association.
Which is to say, to some extent, innocently, people on all sides often DO have in their heads some-kind-of uBPA, and I just wanted to make sure that people knew that in the pure opinion (again, opinion) jrm4 very much thinks the Bad Space is very far from any putative uBPA.
I can imagine your point about it countering the uBPA perspective, but the comments feel more like what I said above. Are people that dumb about uBPA beliefs that they really need to know about one exception? I hope not.
I worry that HN is too much an echo chamber itself: People criticizing perspectives like Bad Space supporters are commonplace here; the Bad Space people might never have space to make a serious argument.
And hey, in my experience, if you want that perspective, head on over to Mastodon; it's ALL there.
edit: ha, I'm being uncharitable. I think it is naive to not understand that there is some sliver of "truthful experience" for most people to the uBPA, regardless of who you are.
I don't consider those types of efforts well meaning anymore.
Rather than changing minds they without fail seem to attract narcissists and people utilizing victimhood like a status item or the like and that and purity spirals like a cudgel.
>I find that most everyone on Mastodon focuses properly, but too much on "Black people aren't much into Mastodon because of the racism," and not "Black people aren't much into Mastodon because it's boring as hell."
It's sad to say but I think black people aren't big in the tech space or similar spaces in general and not just in the US. Fosdem is one of the most pasty conventions out there in a rather international city.
As an outsider looking in I think just like with the lack of women in tech it's not primarily a barrier problem.
And this is a different subject but I in factthink some of the weird campaigning towards women to join has had the opposite effect (Think 'barbie and her pink laptop entering the male dominated field' type stuff just reinforcing pointlessly gendered preconceptions.)
Black people are emphatically absolutely big in tech in the US, just not in a lot of well known "classic" arena; way more in the business tech space. Like linkedin, not slashdot.
like, the 4chan tech board is a great source of information and also a disgusting cesspool of casual racism. C'est la vie.
What do you mean?