cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/5257349
Fore some times, mastodon has been unsafe for black and other minorities users, the peoples impacted by this have been complaining about it openly, emphasizing the lack of good moderation tools to make instances safer. The 
s on the dev team and userbase however have essentially plugged their ears and refused to listen, and instead engaged in bad faith, tone policing, minimizing racism, dismissing the testimony of black users, and telling them to “curate their experience better” with filters and blocks (even though a big part of the complaint is that this doesn’t work).
Seeing this, some black peoples who have been complaining about racism on mastodon and the lack of security features to deal with it have taken things in their own hands and made a fork of Mastodon named Awujo.
leaning too hard on “code is law” here. The code is run on a sever which is a tool that can be managed by people in whatever social context they decide. Just as for example a bus is not necessarily a feudal system even if it can only be driven by the person with the key with everyone else along for the ride, if for instance it is a bus belonging to an organization which communally decides who drives it and where.
Most existing fediverse servers may presently be fairly described as feudal but that’s not something that I think must be addressed in code. It’s up to people to form organizations that run fediverse servers democratically (some already are) and to promote this as the fediverse ideal.