In 4 things white people can do to start making the fediverse less toxic for Black people (DRAFT!) and its cross-posts, quite a few people said things like "maybe racism is a problem on Mastodon, but I don't see it on Lemmy." Then again, plenty of comments in the various threads were in fact examples of racism on Lemmy, so one takeaway is that at lot of people don't see racism even when they're looking at it. And helpful commenters pointed out some of the other patterns of racism on Lemmy. ... but that wasn't really the thrust of that discussion.

So I wanted to ask more generally, what are some of the examples you've seen of racism on Lemmy? Quotes and links are great, but also feel free just to describe examples or call out more general patterns!

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[–] rimu@piefed.social 28 points 3 months ago (10 children)

Reasons why racism on Lemmy is less of an issue:

There are only a few Lemmy instances - those that harbor racism are easily defederated from.
Downvotes make bad content easy to detect, even if not reported.
Content is posted into communities, which have moderators. Hashtags on Mastodon are un-moderated.
Unlike mastodon, replies are sent to all instances so visibility is higher. No hiding in obscurity.
Federated networks tend to have a central hub - Lemmy.world is well moderated, unlike mastodon.social.

[+] thenexusofprivacy@lemmy.blahaj.zone -8 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (8 children)

These are all good points (and not having anything like Mastodon's followers-only posts removes another way to hide in obscurity). Moderators certainly got involved in some of the cross-posts of the earlier thread, at least a dozen comments were removed on beehaw and a couple people got banned from the awful.systems thread.

On the other hand, downvoting can also be used as a weapon to try to bury discussions of racism (this thread btw is at -17, the previous one is at -70).

Also somebody here mentions that "There’s currently only 1 user that I’ve noticed that keeps bringing race up." (hiii!!!!). A culture where people don't talk about race means that whiteness is normalized and unexamined. And quite a few of the comments in this thread (saying I'm the racist, analogizing me to a "Karen", calling me a fool) and the previous ones ("is this a joke?", "haha", "Lol, how is race relevant? Obv rage bait shitpost", the one analogizing me to Hitler) are all consistent with an environment where reactions to somebody bringing up race are hostile. Almost nobody is challenging these comments, in fact they've got plenty of upvotes.

[–] rimu@piefed.social 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Moderators certainly got involved in some of the cross-posts of the earlier thread, at least a dozen comments were removed on beehaw and a couple people got banned from the awful.systems thread.

It seems as if the only way you'd ever say there is NO racism on Lemmy is if there was no need to moderate racist posts - if there were no racist people present. That's a much higher bar than "have you SEEN racism", which requires racist posts to be left unmoderated for a substantial amount of time so that many people can see them and then provide the "quotes and links" you are soliciting. It feels like you've shifted the goalposts a bit, now.

[–] thenexusofprivacy@lemmy.blahaj.zone -2 points 3 months ago

I was agreeing with you that moderation can make a big difference in how many people see the racist posts (and defederating from instances that are known sources of racism). Still, even when moderators remove posts, people still see them -- people in this thread talked about posts using "playing the race card", inflammatory memes, and other stuff that moderators removed. So I don't see it as moving the bar from the question of whether people have seen racism. But I certainly agree that racism that moderators don't address is a bigger problem!

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