This post about Mastodon's failures from @u2764 reads a little weird to me - there are casual mentions of POC, disabled people, other marginalised groups being driven off or discouraged from contributing to Mastodon about the same way as the queer developers that originally started it, but somehow ONLY the queer devs get mourned here? Like they were the most important minority group?
https://medium.com/@alliethehart/gameingers-are-dead-and-so-is-mastodon-705b535ed616
Were there no QPOC, queer disabled, queer + some other identity developers involved in the start of Mastodon? Were there no other non-queer minorities involved in the development of Mastodon? Is their erasure part of the reason Mastodon comes off as being very VERY white?
The "politics needs to be hidden" comment certainly comes off as being very questionable.
@creatrixtiara The "politics" in "tag your politics" was really shorthand for "upsetting recent news especially daily-Trump/U.S.-shit." Things we know as "political" in the sense of class, sexuality/gender, and (afaik) ethnicity & race were never asked to be tagged/hidden.
But yes, until and during The Incident, I saw poc urgently claiming that they were suffering stuff that most of us white users didn't see, didn't want to see, or explained away.
@brooke "The Incident"?
And well re Trump/US shit. Would me talking about my concerns getting a US visa coz Trump be counted as "politics" even though I'd just be talking about my personal life? (As an example.)
@creatrixtiara Briefly & in deference to those who saw/knew more, several poc left en masse b/c when they pointed out microaggressions or ways Masto had built-in problems for them, they weren't heard.
Can't say of course what your experience would have been, but I saw a lot of folk talking/teaching about visa experience/concerns, not tagged as politics & w no complaints. Mostly folks just didn't want "OMFG WHAT TRUMP SAID WE GONNA DIE" filling feed as on November-February Twitter.
@brooke oyyy, sounds like my first weekend here. Sorry to hear I wasn't alone in that experience :\
(Although interestingly this is like the first or second time I've heard about this as a specific incident. When I first heard the "oh why are there no minorities here" Q it seemed posed as a problem of marketing, no one mentioned this issue until me and I had just been on Mastodon a few HOURS)
masto discourse
@creatrixtiara I know @vahnj has invited input, whether openly or privately (as via Direct toots). They might also have info for you on that episode involving some poc leaving, respecting user privacy of course. (I'm not trying to be obscure: most of the incident took place almost wholly off the public time line in fragmented collections of @-replies, iirc, and it was hard to know anything that was happening even if you were actively trying to keep up.)
masto discourse
@brooke @creatrixtiara I'd love to sit down and put out my view of what happened was but it's still an incomplete picture- there's a very fragmented story of all the things that have happened woven into our history, but to be frank there weren't any intersectional devs that I know of
If you'd like to know more I'm totally open to talking about this- though I'm a little preoccupied today so it'd be later today that I talk about it