Texas-based writer and hol.ogra.ph co-admin

Feel free to follow me at @gil@hol.ogra.ph

(he/they)

  • 17 Posts
  • 79 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 1st, 2023

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  • Just a side note - I would caution about directing non-Black folks to spaces like # BlackMastodon and @ blackfedi, just because those spaces might not be intentioned for non-Black people to look at, directing us there might be encouraging our participation in spaces where it’s not necessarily invited or wanted, etc. Great spaces to direct Black folks to if they’re looking to build a community for themselves on fedi, but I would just say it’s best for non-Black people to not look/participate unless the space is specifically inviting that.

    The other thing about the “just listen more to more Black people” discourse is that while it may fix representational issues of whom you’re choosing to listen to, it won’t help if there’s no intention to work on racial biases or challenge one’s own racist behaviors - so I would even implore that type of introspective work. Connected to that would be, even if a white person starts doing these things and working on this practice, that work of interrogating your own biases/behaviors never stops. I feel that white people (especially on fedi) often need reminding that just because you’re doing X, Y, Z, etc. doesn’t mean that you’re done working on your own racism or that your reasons for doing X, Y, Z, etc. are all genuine.

    You might also want to mention how having some marginalized identity even as a white person doesn’t excuse you from doing this work - there’s a lot of harm done on fedi by people who use their own oppressed identities as a way to avert accountability for being racist. In your piece, you already mentioned that supporting Black people and fighting anti-Blackness means supporting all Black people - you could make that understanding of how anti-Blackness is interconnected/intertwined with other oppressions more apparent by appealing to white people who might consider themselves staunch advocates for other communities but refuse to confront racism.

    This is kind of a mess of different comments but those are just my raw thoughts after reading what you wrote.



  • Look, I understand where you’re coming from and what you’re saying, but please bring down the temperature in your comments, even if others seem pedantic or nitpicking to you.

    You’re welcome to express your opinion and agree or disagree with others as you see fit, but when you do so please remember the human on the other end of the discussion. There’s no need for picking unnecessary fights with others or being overly antagonistic, and we’re seeing a pattern of these threads you’re involved in getting really heated.















  • i give my week a 4/5, been busy the past few days trying to set up a Firefish instance with my partner which has been just awesome and i’m super excited to open it up and get people on it! rly inspired by beehaw’s community-building style.

    in less awesome news i’m moving back home at the end of the week and i’m not looking forward to it. moving is so stressful and i don’t want to be back home with my dad either lol.






  • This is pretty much the position we took when clearing that comment thread — I didn’t scrutinize between ideologies, I removed a variety of comments just for not being nice or for being potentially inciting/inflammatory. I had to remove several comments in that thread by liberals as well for being unproductive or even toxic.

    Only nit I have about your comment is that “sanitized space” is a term we came up with for the mod philosophy. We explicitly meant it in the context of removing “not nice” comments. It expresses the fact that we can’t perfectly clear the space of anything which an individual user might find offensive or harmful. The standards for gauging safety/harm in a space vary from user to user; our moderation has to consider our users collectively rather than just one of them. This is part of why Beehaw is not a sanitized space and aims, rather, to be what one might describe as a safe space, a brave space, an accountable space, or other similar term.

    Really just putting this out there for the benefit of others, as it seems some are mistaken about the word “sanitized” and what we really meant by it.