Thanks for the perspectives. Agreed that it’s fundamentally a social issue.Fedi’s culture has evolved a lot over time; Before Mastodon: GNU social and the early fediverse has quotes and links from back in the day, including discusison of the 2016 wave of channers and GamerGaters joining GnuSocial. The 2016-7 Mastodon wave was very different, a lot of queer and trans people, but also had major problems with race – the article links to “Dogpiling, weaponized content warning discourse, and a fig leaf for mundane white supremacy” which has a bunch of discussion and links about that. So it got whiter. Flash forward and there’s the 2022/23 wave of people looking for a Twitter alternative … a lot of Black people looking at Mastodon were greeted by the N word so unsurprisingly didn’t stick around; many white people had more positive experiences, and talked about how nice everybody was, So it got whiter. Then there was mid-2024 wave of Redditors … what are the demographics of the people who came? The people who stayed? So I’m not sure it’s primarily a matter of miroblogging being a machine for manufacturing hot takes.

I certainly think there’s an opportunity for changing the dynamics. One possible direction is a split between regions that are actively working on it, and get better over time, and regions that are business as usual, with fairly weak connections between them. Time will tell!