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 crackers 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.

A relevant thread by @tillshadeisgone@blackqueer.life (admin of a black queer instance who has been very vocal about racism on mastodon and has received a lot of cracker backlash for it, go check their account for more threads on the subject)

"A Case for Community" a very short essay written by Awujo founder @are0h@h-i.social about the project

@are0h@h-i.social self introduction post

@are0h@h-i.social's acount

  • blobjim [he/him]
    ·
    2 months ago

    I don't feel like a fork of Mastodon would be successful unless they can pull enough people away from the main project.

    I'd also be wary of giving them money when they don't even have a public repository yet.

    • makotech222 [he/him]
      ·
      2 months ago

      As long as they maintain federation, it should work pretty seamlessly i think.

      • blobjim [he/him]
        ·
        2 months ago

        I'm talking about development of the code. "Maintaining federation" means pulling in most of the changes from the main Mastodon sources, and they said it's a "hard fork", so it seems like they're going to be creating a lot of work for themselves. It would have to get a lot of support for the devs to not just get burned out or demotivated if a bunch of the work is just maintaining compatibility.

        • hypercracker [he/him]
          ·
          2 months ago

          There are already a bunch of mastodon forks/alternative AP implementations anyway. Misskey, gotosocial just off the top of my head.

          It's hard to convey how dysfunctional the mastodon FOSS project is beyond just linking you to see the number of un-merged pull requests.

            • EelBolshevikism [none/use name]
              ·
              2 months ago

              not entirely true if you consider all the OG stuff. I think most people would consider the linux kernel at least passable

              • footfaults [none/use name]
                ·
                2 months ago

                The Linux kernel project has an incredibly high barrier to entry, Linus has had to take anger management classes, lots of maintainers are burnt out, and they had a lot of drama over a Code of Conduct.

                Just because the software quality is good, doesn't mean the culture isn't dysfunctional