{
  "$type": "site.standard.document",
  "canonicalUrl": "https://www.jacky.wtf//essays/2024/against-microblogging",
  "path": "/essays/2024/against-microblogging",
  "publishedAt": "2024-09-22T02:30:00.000Z",
  "site": "at://did:plc:e2ctbutx6kya6si4if5ngjmm/site.standard.publication/3mniussyp2d2g",
  "tags": "essay",
  "textContent": "I recently mentioned my want to distance [from the open social Web][1]. What I highlighted were\nunderpinnings of routinely unaddressed and frequent hampering that pull me into dramatic\nsituations, usually with no one prompting me to do so. My personal gripe is that the act of\n\"microblogging\", publishing short amount of text, has made this experience even _more_ taxing. Folks\navoid being explicit, reduce the majority of conversations into smaller epitaphs (if not straight\nout omission of the situation) and, for the Fediverse &mdash; mainly the digital ecosystem\nI've experienced while using Mastodon. This is not necessarily a new phenomenon for me. I, like many\nfolks who used the Internet, had a Twitter account and being visibly Black and vocal on the Internet\nled to many situations of inserting oneself in discussion in _hopes_ of nudging it to a point of\nreflection or clarity but instead finding that any sort of visible safety I've known to experience\noffline be eroded online.\n\n[Ashe posted a paper][4] whose premise I understood and witnessed online but hadn't had a chance to dig\ninto theory. It talks about _respectability politics_ in the digital space; where folks, namely\npeople of color, but anyone who falls out of the cisheteropatriarchial definition of what it means to\nbe on the Internet and their _requirement_ to align with the mannerisms of a straight white man,\nlikely Christian (or not) in order to avoid forms of harassment (at best) and abuse (which can\nviolently escalate to offline echos). As with many things in the space of revolutionary protections\nand identities, this idea was pioneered by Black women. In the event you don't [read the paper][5]\nyourself, I'll quote some parts that I find relevant to this:\n\n> Respectability politics has three main facets. First, it reinforces within-group stratification\n> to juxtapose a respectable us against a shameful other, such as unrespectable Black people\n> or promiscuous gay men. While [it's described] as a way to counter racist stereotypes and\n> structures, respectability requires condemning behaviors deemed unworthy of respect\n> within one’s in-group. Second, respectability endorses values that contradict stereotypes,\n> such as presenting Black women as modest, thereby enforcing a dominant narrative that women\n> should exercise sexual restraint. Third, practicing respectability involves impression management\n> to align with White, middle-class indicators of class status and privilege, such as using\n> standard English rather than African-American vernacular English in racially-mixed audiences.\n\nThis brings to home the point of the issue that even led me to write about this: a lot of folks were\npiling on _one Black person_ in response to _another Black person_ that was blocked by an instance\nwhose administrator is _openly_ racist and hostile to Black people. Because the target\n(who, again, was _not_ the person from which this issue originated) is not one to fall back from a\nsituation of bigotry, the original person who kicked this off has not only been shielded by their\npotential peers but kept _completely_ away from accountability. This immediate defensive solely\nbased on identity is what encouraged many folks, like the poster of the recent request to block\nthe target in question, to engage in a form of bad faith questioning and tone policing. These are\nthings that I mentioned in [a second post][3] about the nature of white people leaning on a\nweaponed form of intersectionality (or a perverse form of it) to periodically invoke this behavior.\n\nMy root disdain for microblogging is two-fold: it's the space in which I've seen this happen _the\nmost_; as a personal observation. It's something that's led me to have to remake a Twitter account\nto follow other Black people who've been run out of the Fediverse or those who choose to remain in\nplaces like BlueSky due to, what [eva][6] has dubbed, the HOA behavior of the Fediverse.\nSecondly, I do not see any evidence of folks being able to use microblogging to help move people\nto a place of reckoning &mdash; outside of 40-post-plus reply chains, which is indicative of the\nweakness of it of a medium of resolution. Effectively, the behaviors and culture of Twitter that was\nresented by _so many_ in the Fediverse has become part of its (policing) framework. And there's no\nreal interest in removing that.\n\nA Potential Fix\nI did ask for a demonstration of what could have helped prevent this situation from escalating and\nwasn't answered directly. I changed the question to be about affordance and [got linked to a GitHub\nissue][8] that does something quite similar to experiences I've seen on Twitch (that I find quite\nhelpful). It's hard to imagine something like this getting shipped into Mastodon due to the inertia\nof such a project but that isn't a reason to dismiss it. In fact, if other implementations pick up\nand promote it as a Fediverse Enhancement Proposal (FEP) then we can see it potentially becoming an\nextension to ActivityPub proper.\n\nBut in between that time and now, we will still have the issue described. And that one is still one\nthat can be circumvented - either by someone blocking parts of a Web page, a client that has yet to\nbe updated or many other things that come from a distributed community that has different\napproaches, different rules and different ideas on what it means to \"behave\" on the Internet. Until\nthen, I (personally) will begin to refrain from engaging in these kind of conversations; make use of\nthe mute + note options more often and reduce my microblogging use to be follower-only. That's all\npreceding my previous want to pull away from these spaces altogether.\n\nAs pointed out by another person online, the Fediverse has a conflated (undefined) understanding of\ncommunity. And I do not believe that it can be solved in a generic way: we are peoples of many\nplaces and walks; we will not agree on everything (nor can we). So having the potentiality of an\nalmost-forced global community, even in a federated space, is not going to happen without\nreproducing the same nation-state adjacent behavior we see offline. I close with what, to some might\nseem pessimistic but is already underway, I think it's going to continue to happen if we all don't\ntry to make this issue something of the past:\n\n<iframe src=\"https://todon.eu/@jalcine/113166996930347913/embed\" class=\"mastodon-embed\" style=\"max-width: 100%; border: 0\" width=\"400\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"></iframe><script src=\"https://todon.eu/embed.js\" async=\"async\"></script>\n<noscript>\n<p>\n    A post at <a\n    href=\"https://todon.eu/@jalcine/113166996930347913\">https://todon.eu/@jalcine/113166996930347913</a>\n    saying:\n</p>\n<blockquote>\n    I feel like, from observations and conversations with folks not as Online as I, that\n    the future of the Web for folks who aren't so technically inclined is going to be\n    within more apps or in closed off communities. Because everything else is being\n    vacuumed into the faceless LLM machine and defended by its loyalists and more folks\n    are interested in being the The Next Big Thing than engaging these communities and\n    figuring out how to reach them halfway.\n</blockquote>\n</noscript>\n\n[1]: /essays/2024/deinvest-open-web/\n[2]: https://todon.eu/@jalcine/113177053049140455\n[3]: https://todon.eu/@jalcine/113177760090311256\n[4]: https://todon.eu/@Ashedryden@xoxo.zone/113171210397237239\n[5]: https://academic.oup.com/jcmc/article/23/3/163/4962541\n[6]: https://blackqueer.life/@tillshadeisgone\n[7]: /essays/2024/one-over-other/\n[8]: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/10384",
  "title": "The Potential Case against Microblogging"
}