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.” Of course, 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!

  • bionicjoey@lemmy.ca
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    3 months ago

    The whole point of the fediverse is that it’s distributed. There’s gonna be bigots. But they can be blocked, their instances can ban them, and then they can make their own instances which other instances can then defederate. That’s working as designed. In a perfect world, the bigoted instances will be a disconnected graph from the network of other instances.

    • intensely_human@lemm.ee
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      3 months ago

      You don’t think having a disconnected graph consisting of only bigots would lead to amplification and advancement of the bigotry?

      • comfy
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        3 months ago

        Why would it? It seems like it would just be similar to the circlejerk forums they’ve have for decades, alienated from the mainstream and unable to normalize their ideas and recruit so easily.