The Potential Case against Microblogging

I recently mentioned my want to distance from the open social Web. What I highlighted were underpinnings of routinely unaddressed and frequent hampering that pull me into dramatic situations, usually with no one prompting me to do so. My personal gripe is that the act of "microblogging", publishing short amount of text, has made this experience even more taxing. Folks avoid being explicit, reduce the majority of conversations into smaller epitaphs (if not straight out omission of the situation) and, for the Fediverse — mainly the digital ecosystem I've experienced while using Mastodon. This is not necessarily a new phenomenon for me. I, like many folks who used the Internet, had a Twitter account and being visibly Black and vocal on the Internet led to many situations of inserting oneself in discussion in hopes of nudging it to a point of reflection or clarity but instead finding that any sort of visible safety I've known to experience offline be eroded online.

Ashe posted a paper whose premise I understood and witnessed online but hadn't had a chance to dig into theory. It talks about respectability politics in the digital space; where folks, namely people of color, but anyone who falls out of the cisheteropatriarchial definition of what it means to be on the Internet and their requirement to align with the mannerisms of a straight white man, likely Christian (or not) in order to avoid forms of harassment (at best) and abuse (which can violently escalate to offline echos). As with many things in the space of revolutionary protections and identities, this idea was pioneered by Black women. In the event you don't read the paper yourself, I'll quote some parts that I find relevant to this:

Respectability politics has three main facets. First, it reinforces within-group stratification to juxtapose a respectable us against a shameful other, such as unrespectable Black people or promiscuous gay men. While [it's described] as a way to counter racist stereotypes and structures, respectability requires condemning behaviors deemed unworthy of respect within one’s in-group. Second, respectability endorses values that contradict stereotypes, such as presenting Black women as modest, thereby enforcing a dominant narrative that women should exercise sexual restraint. Third, practicing respectability involves impression management to align with White, middle-class indicators of class status and privilege, such as using standard English rather than African-American vernacular English in racially-mixed audiences.

This brings to home the point of the issue that even led me to write about this: a lot of folks were piling on one Black person in response to another Black person that was blocked by an instance whose administrator is openly racist and hostile to Black people. Because the target (who, again, was not the person from which this issue originated) is not one to fall back from a situation of bigotry, the original person who kicked this off has not only been shielded by their potential peers but kept completely away from accountability. This immediate defensive solely based on identity is what encouraged many folks, like the poster of the recent request to block the target in question, to engage in a form of bad faith questioning and tone policing. These are things that I mentioned in a second post about the nature of white people leaning on a weaponed form of intersectionality (or a perverse form of it) to periodically invoke this behavior.

My root disdain for microblogging is two-fold: it's the space in which I've seen this happen the most; as a personal observation. It's something that's led me to have to remake a Twitter account to follow other Black people who've been run out of the Fediverse or those who choose to remain in places like BlueSky due to, what eva has dubbed, the HOA behavior of the Fediverse. Secondly, I do not see any evidence of folks being able to use microblogging to help move people to a place of reckoning — outside of 40-post-plus reply chains, which is indicative of the weakness of it of a medium of resolution. Effectively, the behaviors and culture of Twitter that was resented by so many in the Fediverse has become part of its (policing) framework. And there's no real interest in removing that.

A Potential Fix I did ask for a demonstration of what could have helped prevent this situation from escalating and wasn't answered directly. I changed the question to be about affordance and got linked to a GitHub issue that does something quite similar to experiences I've seen on Twitch (that I find quite helpful). It's hard to imagine something like this getting shipped into Mastodon due to the inertia of such a project but that isn't a reason to dismiss it. In fact, if other implementations pick up and promote it as a Fediverse Enhancement Proposal (FEP) then we can see it potentially becoming an extension to ActivityPub proper.

But in between that time and now, we will still have the issue described. And that one is still one that can be circumvented - either by someone blocking parts of a Web page, a client that has yet to be updated or many other things that come from a distributed community that has different approaches, different rules and different ideas on what it means to "behave" on the Internet. Until then, I (personally) will begin to refrain from engaging in these kind of conversations; make use of the mute + note options more often and reduce my microblogging use to be follower-only. That's all preceding my previous want to pull away from these spaces altogether.

As pointed out by another person online, the Fediverse has a conflated (undefined) understanding of community. And I do not believe that it can be solved in a generic way: we are peoples of many places and walks; we will not agree on everything (nor can we). So having the potentiality of an almost-forced global community, even in a federated space, is not going to happen without reproducing the same nation-state adjacent behavior we see offline. I close with what, to some might seem pessimistic but is already underway, I think it's going to continue to happen if we all don't try to make this issue something of the past:

A post at https://todon.eu/@jalcine/113166996930347913 saying:

I feel like, from observations and conversations with folks not as Online as I, that the future of the Web for folks who aren't so technically inclined is going to be within more apps or in closed off communities. Because everything else is being vacuumed into the faceless LLM machine and defended by its loyalists and more folks are interested in being the The Next Big Thing than engaging these communities and figuring out how to reach them halfway.