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.” Then again, 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!
It seems as if the only way you’d ever say there is NO racism on Lemmy is if there was no need to moderate racist posts - if there were no racist people present. That’s a much higher bar than “have you SEEN racism”, which requires racist posts to be left unmoderated for a substantial amount of time so that many people can see them and then provide the “quotes and links” you are soliciting. It feels like you’ve shifted the goalposts a bit, now.
I was agreeing with you that moderation can make a big difference in how many people see the racist posts (and defederating from instances that are known sources of racism). Still, even when moderators remove posts, people still see them – people in this thread talked about posts using “playing the race card”, inflammatory memes, and other stuff that moderators removed. So I don’t see it as moving the bar from the question of whether people have seen racism. But I certainly agree that racism that moderators don’t address is a bigger problem!