Post #2234007

2026-05-06 14:56 UTC

@AndyDearden@mastodon.green One thing I'm realizing, of course after I hit post, is that one thing I'm not making clear in the OP is that because I'm Indigenous, I don't really feel there being much different sticking my head into Substack over sticking it in here. I'm actually generally *more* unwelcome here, because very few believe Substack or X to be an ethical good, so critique of them is accepted. However, many people rely on Mastodon/Fediverse being an ethical good, so critique is felt as a deep threat their own sense of goodness, and so I believe the closest and worst enemy. I'll try and make another post that highlights this, becuase it's something I *keep* messing up when I try and talk about this, and it's something folk the Fediverse hate hearing: But *every* non-white person I know feels safer on X than here. I mean, I've only been doxxed by Twitter once, and this place has doxxed me literally like 8 times.

Replies (1)

@rancholibertad@climatejustice.social 2026-05-06 15:36

@emsenn@kolektiva.social @AndyDearden@mastodon.green This feels critically important, and really difficult to navigate at the same time. On the one hand, everything you're saying is 100% and I have no critique, and it encapsulates a *feeling* that we lack the capacity for transmitting in such a way as to ground in the philosophical basis you have here, so yes, thank you! On the other hand, there are layers of nuance, at least as we see this. First, there is a sense (for some of us) that there *is* some radicalism in denying the hegemony of income-through-platform on things like Instagram. We *could* probably do ok on Instagram, the farm aesthetic, etc etc, and probably X as well, and increase our capacity for financing this project through increased exposure. We choose not to because whilst the narrative of the "pure frontier" of the Fediverse *is* colonial, *is* mostly run by white people (and to be frank even some of the Indigenous narratives on this platform seem dominated by mostly white-passing Indigenous folk from vastly different sociocultural backgrounds than us), and while all of that frustratingly impacts how we can navigate this platform... Our presence on Instagram or X also feels wrong, given not just the *politics* of the platforms (which seems to be the biggest critique by folks on this platform but to us that seems to miss the point a bit) but the *technologies*, their ownership, the necessity to commodify whatever it is we wish to share. Substack is, as I can tell, mildly different because of the reality of long form content vs. short form video or even "microblogging" content, though I'm sure (or rather, would be curious to know) if you ever feel that that platform does the same, in a way: requires the castration of message, the transmutation into "content" in order to be granted the privilege of platformization or exposure? Because to us there is a degree of frustration in either case: the Fediverse AND the corporate socials all require that to transmit our knowledge and experience we must placate their end user: folks embedded in a colonial cultural hegemony who, despite their own claims, generally wish to be made to feel good rather than challenged. Though, at least on the Fedi there is, I suppose, the capacity to argue with things like moderation decisions publicly, to spin up a new account easily, and to perhaps maintain some degree further of deoupling from our legal identities (though we know privacy here is almost as much a farce as it is elsewhere). And I know all of this is mostly a tangential reply to the OP, and not necessarily a direct one, so we hope that's welcome.

Open ##2234008