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Can Mastodon be a Twitter refuge for marginalized groups?

The Twitter implosion has brought a flood of people seeking a safer, less-toxic environment. The results have been mixed.

Can Mastodon be a Twitter refuge for marginalized groups?

[Photo: Gabby Jones/Bloomberg via Getty Images]

BY Sean Captain10 minute read

Twitter’s future is as uncertain as ever, with thousands of staffers fired or quitting, most previously banned accounts being reinstated and Elon Musk, claiming that Apple has threatened to remove Twitter from its App Store. But there was already plenty of hostility and harassment on Twitter before Musk arrived.

As a result, people are flocking to Mastodon, the decentralized, open-source network. As the Mastodon universe swells (going from about 300,000 active users before the Twitter takeover to over two-and-a-half million as of this writing), hopes are high among longterm users and new arrivals that both the spirit and the technical underpinnings of the network will secure a safer space for marginalized groups. But some Mastodon old-timers—especially users of color—are warning that Mastodon can also turn toxic.

A different kind of network

Since its founding in 2016, Mastodon has emerged as a place of refuge for groups, such as the LGBTQ community, that have faced harassment online. “I cannot count the number of people who I’ve seen and followed…on Mastodon and then come and realize more things about their gender identity, their sexual orientation, their different community markers,” says David Wolfpaw, a queer, trans web developer who founded the tech.lgbt Mastodon community in April 2017. “A lot of people, and I myself would be included as well, have said that exposure to new, different types of identities in a space [where] it’s safe to ask questions, it’s safe to learn from others and generally not be instantly harassed has been very helpful.” 

And people in Mastodon seem to be more diligent, Wolfpaw says, noting that they are more likely to read the terms of service for communities, which typically prohibit any type of harassment or hostility.

Nevertheless, Wolfpaw sees plenty of bad behavior on the network. On the recent Transgender Day of Remembrance (commemorating transgender murder victims), they posted a selfie wearing a shirt that read “Protect trans kids.” Another user posted a reply, labeling Wolfpaw a “groomer,” implying that supporting LGBTQ youth is a marker of a child sexual abuser.

But Wolfpaw didn’t have to appeal to a faceless, beleaguered help center in Silicon Valley for help. They saw that the attacker had created their own Mastodon server for posting hateful messages. With a few clicks, Wolfpaw could block the poster not only from attacking them but from reaching anyone in the tech.lgbt community.

Here’s a key way in which Mastodon is different: Instead of a single entity, Mastodon exists as a federation of communities (called the fediverse) that can talk to each other, but only if they want to. If the administrators of a community, called an “instance,” decide that another instance is dangerous or abusive, they can block all contact between the two—an act called defederation. (Wolfpaw says that abusive behavior has gone up in the past month or two, but at best in proportion to the overall growth of Mastodon membership. For example, their instance has grown 10x, and they have seen more moderation reports, “but not nearly 10x reports,” they say.)

If members of an instance don’t like these decisions, it may be easier to appeal. “All of our moderators are listed on our ‘about’ page, ” says Wolfpaw. “They know exactly where to find us if they don’t agree with the decisions that we make.”

That contrasts with the deteriorating responsiveness at Twitter. “I think we’ve seen a sort of slow steady . . . worsening, at least in my own experience, over the last one to two years,” says Chris McCulloh, a paraplegic surgeon who cofounded the instance disabled.social on November 11. “But it’s gotten a lot more prominent in the last month or two, and in particular the last few weeks. The responses are just not there, and things are just not happening,” he says.

COVID has made the environment for disabled people more combative. “So the bulk of the disability community, obviously, is really into COVID protections and COVID precautions because a lot of us are at increased risk of complications,” says disabled.social cofounder Ashley, better known by her handle @PanickedFoodie@disabled.social. (She asks that we not publish her last name for fear of receiving more of the harassment she’s gotten on Twitter, criticizing her caution over the disease.)

“I think with this Mastodon community, we’re gonna be able to talk openly about our fears about catching COVID and other things that we’re doing to protect ourselves without being mocked and degraded,” says Ashley. Her optimism comes in part from her faith in the federated system, with the ability of smaller communities to respond to users and block bad actors.

What’s more, administrators share lists of troublesome instances (in posts with the #fediblock hashtag), building something like an immune system that identifies pathogens and mounts a fediverse-wide response.

A different experience for people of color

As many longstanding and newer members have been finding enthusiasm and inclusion on Mastodon, people of color have been warning of the fediverse’s toxic side. One person I reached out to, a prominent academic with a large social media presence, declined an interview on the topic, saying they didn’t want to experience “more death threats.”

But assistant professor of philosophy at California State University Northridge Jonathan Flowers, who is active on the zirk.us Mastodon community, says that abuse has been disproportionately higher on Mastodon.

In early November, Flowers posted a provocative tweet questioning the perceived greater rigor of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) education vs. the humanities—just the kind of post to ignite a firestorm in Twitter subcultures. “It kind of circulated on Twitter for about a week or so before I got homophobic and racist comments in my direct messages and in some of the replies,” says Flowers. A similar comment on Mastodon spurred even more abuse, in just about eight hours, he says, despite the fact that Flowers had over 16 times more followers on Twitter.

This isn’t new, says a queer, POC Australian media artist who goes by the name Creatrix Tiara. They also identify as neurodivergent—a broad term encompassing the autistic spectrum, dyslexia, ADHD, mental illnesses, and other conditions without formal diagnoses in which people perceive or react to the world in an atypical way.

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In 2017, Tiara posted on Mastodon about “how White the [fediverse] space was” and about the techy culture, which also tends to be White. “Within my first few hours there, a hostile instance that was run by a prominent Internet figure found me and harassed me to high heaven,” they say in an email.

“It made all the claims of ‘Mastodon is super safe coz decentralisation’ suspicious,” they write to Fast Company, since there was no central authority to appeal to for help. “I had to rely on the good graces of multiple other instance admins as well as the membership writ large to get that safety back, since it’s not like I can report that instance to their admin, not when their admin is the person instigating that harassment.”

Harassment brought down Mastodon’s early Black and people of color community, playvicious.social. The instance was under attack from its founding in 2017, says one of its moderators, who goes by the name Artist Marcia X. For the first two years, it was the kind of stuff that online people of color have sadly grown used to—like dropping the N-word or denying that racism exists.

But around 2019, things changed. “There started to be then targeted harassment from all sorts of people in all sorts of spaces on the fediverse . . . And then the movements with George Floyd were happening,” says Marcia X. “It’s one thing to have people say ridiculous things in your mentions, but it was a proper harassment campaign—stalkers, cyber stalkers, bots scraping my accounts, people squatting on your timeline and taking screenshots of it and posting it elsewhere.” There were even denial of service attacks and other efforts to get the instance shut down.  “Our safety was starting to become a real risk and also our mental health for that matter,” they say. “We couldn’t handle it anymore.” By December 2020, the site was gone, without even a public archive to preserve its content.

Playvicious.social’s successor may be blacktwitter.io, which seems to have started as a landing place for members of the “Black Twitter” community fleeing Musk’s network. (I had a brief exchange with the site administrator over Mastodon, but they didn’t consent to an interview.) Artist Marcia X believes that the instance’s scale might provide enough resources to withstand the attacks that the smaller playvicious.social couldn’t.

Like Wolfpaw, Marcia X says that cases of outright abuse are inline with the growth of Mastodon. “More users, more chances of abuse,” they write in a followup email. But they also note a big uptick in less-overt attacks, in which “people are having to defend their positions on racism or sexism (for example) and deal with constant back and forths on basics. That may not be classified as abuse, but it quickly spirals into whiteness dominating conversations.” 

A rather white network

The overwhelmingly White presence on Mastodon will remain a challenge, says Flowers. “To the extent that a space’s social organization holds whiteness center, holds white comfort center, holds the norms, values, ideals of whiteness center, that space remains a white supremacist space,” he says. Most Whites may not be this way intentionally, he says, but he believes a mindset that puts whiteness over other cultures can exist subconsciously.

It’s hard to address problems if most people on the network don’t see it, which has been Creatrix Tiara’s experience. “There has also been just a ridiculous number of White Mastodon members who see BIPOC [Black, Indigenous, People of Color] discussions about their own experiences on Mastodon and reply with ‘well I’ve never seen it so I’m sure it’s all fine’ or ‘just block and report!’ or ‘start your own instance then’ or ‘but it’s better than Twitter’ which is super unhelpful,” they say.

While other communities have also faced online harassment, different groups’ experiences vary. Complicating it more, people have multiple identities. “I’m fairly light skinned. I was raised in the US mainly, and have a lot of privilege,” says David Wolfpaw of tech.lgbt. “But that doesn’t change the fact that I’m Puerto Rican and that when I walk around, a lot of people easily identify that about me.” Wolfpaw doesn’t track the ethnic background of tech.lgbt’s members, but they suspect that it skews heavily White—reflecting the demographics of the tech community that is so prevalent on Mastodon. However, tech.lgbt does appear to have a strong incidence of disabled and neurodivergent members, they say.

“I’ve seen intersections along the areas of neurodivergence [and] LGBTQ,” says Ashley of disabled.social. As for people of color, “we don’t have as many people from those communities,” she says. Ashley is aware of the challenge and is working to recruit a diverse cadre of moderators. “As a White person, there’s subtleties that I’m never gonna be able to pick up because I’m not part of that demographic.”

Despite their differences, Mastodon communities do face some common headaches. One is outsiders budding into groups’ conversations. Some instances are happy to have others listen and learn, but resent getting challenged or asked to explain their situation again and again. “People wanna be in a community where they can discuss those things without necessarily having to explain how they feel or worrying that people aren’t gonna understand how they feel,” says Chris McCulloh of disabled.social. And often, “I’m just asking a question” is a way to couch what is really an attack, says Wolfpaw.

A fragmenting fediverse

It appears that abuse is getting worse as Mastodon grows. “Long time mastodonians that I have spoken to on public servers have indicated to me that the kinds of abuse they experience has ramped up since the population of mastodon has increased,” says Flowers. “In fact, many smaller instances…have begun defederating from larger instances because the moderation teams of larger instances are unwilling to police bad actors and protect individuals from abuse.”

Defederating remains the strongest tool to cut off abuse in the fediverse. But if the trend continues, the fediverse gradually breaks into a collection of isolated fiefdoms. I ask Marcia X if this starts to look like a “separate but equal” scenario—referencing the Jim Crow tenet that segregation could be fair for everyone.

“I don’t agree with trying to ghettoize people of color into one singular instance so that then no one can complain about anything,” they say. Marcia X continues by questioning whether tech remedies like defederating can ever solve societal problems. “There is no forking, no glitching, no upcycling of the fediverse code that is possible to enable a space for Black individuals and people of color to be safe,” they say. Ultimately, Mastodon reflects the broader makeup of society, including the unsavory elements, says Wolfpaw.

“I don’t agree with forcing people of color to be on their own tiny little instances away from the larger network,” says Marcia X. “So what’s the compromise? We haven’t quite figured it out yet.”

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sean Captain is a business, technology, and science journalist based in North Carolina. Follow him on Twitter @seancaptain. More