Reading so many accounts of especially Black people being harassed on here to the point of leaving. And also the type of aversion there is to talking about it. SMH. Can’t we have anything that isn’t racist by default?
@timnitGebru It has to be exhausting to be Black on fedi.
I wonder what the rest of us could do to help? One (long standing) critique I've heard by Black users is that blocking is unidirectional - I can block you and not see your content, but by default you could still see mine. Maybe we could campaign for that issue to be addressed, which would add friction to harassment?
Or, you know, we could all agree not to be awful to each other.
@derek @timnitGebru blocking should be bidirectional, agreed. It isn’t enough to say “I don’t want to see your content” it should be “I control who sees my content” as well. I thought that this was EXACTLY the ethos that @Gargron and the #fediverse was trying to cultivate. If that’s not true, that’s a problem.
Looking at old Github threads to try to understand the issue better: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/11503
One technical discussion is how to block users from seeing posts marked public in a federated ecosystem. You have to a server respect a block instruction for one of its users. Perhaps there's an answer to that...
@derek well there are so-called unlisted toots. However this is sort of like “blaming the victim” or “punishing the victim” by silencing them on the rest of the network. What I would love to see is cryptography used more widely within the network. I’d love to see an asymmetric PKI that pairs reading toots with key exchange of some kind such that in order to decrypt a toot, you must obtain a key from the tooter— who can choose to not provide you with the key.