Ah, Lemmy: Racism and Denial in the Threadiverse (DRAFT)

Draft! Work in progress!
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When I shared a draft of 4 things white people can do to start making the fediverse less toxic for Black people to multiple Lemmy communities,¹ I got some very helpful feedback ... but also a lot of responses from people who thought that anti-Blackness and racism weren't issues on Lemmy. It's certainly true that a lot more has been written about racism on Mastodon, Pleroma and elsewhere in the microblogging side of the fediverse. The "threadiverse" – federated threaded discussions, including link aggregators like Lemmy as well as forums – hasn't gotten as much attention. But tht doesn't mean racism isn't a problem there as well!

So I followed up with a request for examples of racism², and again got some helpful input ... and a lot of denial. And as with the original threads, there was also a fair amount of hostility.

The denial was particularly funny since several of the threads had spectacular examples of anti-Blackness. Moderators deleted some of the worst examples, like this one (you can probably guess what the removed word was originally).

Still, there are plenty of examples of racism and denial still visible in the threads. For example:

• The lemmy.world discussion of the draft post has now gotten voted down to -73, and the request for examples of racism is at -20 so far. Trying to bury discussions of racism is in fact racist.
• There were several variants of "I don't see color" or "race doesn't/shouldn't matter online." Fitchburg State's What Does Racism Look Like? Colorblindness page has a short overview on why statements like this are so problematic; Eduardo Bonilla-Silva's Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America goes into detail.
• Multiple people stated or implied that I was the racist – either because I kept bringing up racism or because I had suggested that white people should post less. No, sorry, "reverse racism" isn't a thing – and claiming that it exists is racist.

There were also multiple accusations that I was trolling – including one that I was probably a right-winger 🤣

Meanwhile, helpful commenters noted other patterns of racism on Lemmy:

• the comment section on pretty much any post mentioning Islam
• an argument about Black hair styles being banned in schools with a user who turned out to be sealioning
• picking on people who use habitual-be, or specific words and expressions common among African-American Vernacular English speakers
• white people "more than happy to talk over subjects-of-empire like this is still Reddit out here"
• inflammatory random shitposts that the commenter had blocked and reported
• uses of "playing the race card" in a derogatory sense in response to others talking about systemic racist violence (although the commenter also mentioned that moderators had taken them down)

It's certainly true that when moderators react quickly, banning egregious posts, that cuts down how many people see them. As Rimu pointed out in a helpful comment, one of Lemmy's advantages is that communities also have moderators (as opposed to Mastodon et al where the only moderation happens at the instance level). The beehaw.org moderators in particular did a great job wading in, deleting over a dozen posts (including the one that compared me to Hitler that I unfortunately didn't manage to screenshot), and engaging with people who had made other less egregious posts to try to explain the problem to them – a great example of the "calling in" tactic I talked about here.

Still, even with good moderation, the targets of the racism often see the posts before the moderators act on them. And as these threads show, there's plenty of stuff that moderators don't take action on.

It's also true that people on instances that block known sources of racism see less of it. Then again, the instances that people cited as blockworthy in these discussions include three of the top five most-active Lemmy instances, with more than half the active users on Lemmy as a whole.³ And when I quickly checked the other two top-five instances, none of them were blocking all the instances that had been cited. Not only that, microblogging instances can comment on Lemmy posts, so one of my threads got hit by racism from well-known bad actors like shitposter.world who weren't blocked. So, as on Mastodon, defederation is a blunt but powerful tool ... but doesn't solve the problem.

Of course, Lemmy isn't the only threadiverse software out there. Newer platforms like Piefed are designed with more attention to safety; older forum software like NodeBB that's now adding federation has richer moderation technology. And even with Lemmy, instances like Beehaw are working hard to create a safer and more-inclusive environment. So just as with the rest of the fediverse, the threadiverse is still an opportunity to overcome the entrenched racism.

But if anybody tries to tell you that racism isn't currently a problem on Lemmy ... well, at least now there's a (draft) post to point them to.

Notes

¹ including lemmy.blahaj.zone/c/nexusofprivacy, lemmy.world/c/fediverse, beehaw.org/c/technology, and awful.systems/c/techtakes.

² on lemmy.blahaj.zone/c/nexusofprivacy, lemmy.ml/c/AskLemmy and lemmy.world/c/fediverse

³ https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy; sort by MAU to see the list.