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If the mastodon ~community wants to be more welcoming to more people, someone is going to have to do bystander training for dealing with people like this dude. (And the other guys who told her to just block.) He responded to a Black woman’s post about it feeling super white here and went on for like seven posts telling her how to speak and how he was helping her be better.

By not making this guy’s replies visible to most people bc of federation weirdness, the software plays a role, too.

A few weeks back some dude came into my replies for like 11 posts about how I was behaving like a child but he cared about me as a person and would teach me how to speak effectively. No one else saw the replies because he was on a tiny instance. It’s relentless and mostly invisible.

ANYWAY. The alternative is it stays a mostly white mostly male space with N European geek norms, which, okay, but you don’t get to also complain about people using other platforms.

@kissane there needs to be a way to light a flare so the rest of can see these interactions and offer offenders some, oh let's call it "course correction" 😀

@paulkruczynski I don’t do the “boost bad posts to make an example of them” thing but I more people probably should 😬

@kissane @paulkruczynski
Yeah. I really would like a better solution than just boosting bad posts, but absent a better alternative….

I’m totally on board with this general idea. I keep using the phrase “raising the bat signal.” And Erin’s phrase “bystander training” seems like a key thing here.

Erin Kissane

@inthehands @paulkruczynski Like the first thing they teach you in bystander training is to center the person being targeted, but in a quiet peer way, not a performative confrontational way. It's a signal in the moment that someone has people.

Then there's the maybe separate problem of detoxing the people who caused the trouble to begin with.

@kissane
Yes, that’s a really good point. That advice seems directly contrary to boosting the bad post! And surely “hey, this sucks what you’re experiencing, we value you” is a place where a bat signal response needs to start.

I do also want people fueling the toxic replies to experience pushback (either education, request to go away, outright shaming, or blocklisting). Not sure how to balance that. But actively stemming toxic reply habits seems like an important outcome.

@paulkruczynski

@inthehands @kissane In complete agreement here, with one anecdote to add. It's cultural, but the shame I'm thinking of is akin to what exists (or existed until recently in Turkey). A man gropes a woman in the street. Her friend yells what he did and "shame!" - a call taken up by others in the area, all pointing at the man—who then runs away (a real example, btw). It's not a solution, but the bad behavior IS being called out and assigned.