39
votes
Are there any communities for black users on Tildes?
Hi, I'm a mod of several black-focused communities on reddit and haven't seen much black community on tildes since making my account ages ago. I know we can't make our own communities yet, which is disappointing.
Hello fellow mod of black-focused communities!
There is not, that said this isn't reddit, there isn't an underlying anti-black tone or tolerance for I-have-a-black-friend-so-it's-okay-for-me-to-say-this microaggression bullshit or veiled (be it thinly or thickly) racism here. So there isn't/hasn't been a need for a black moderated, black friendly space to escape the masses.
I will preface this by saying that I am not black, but my oldest daughter is, and everyone in my immediate family is non-white, so I try to look out for issues around race in any online community of which I am a part.
I would like to forcefully underline what @AugustusFerdinand said: there is not an underlying anti-black tone - no more so than with well meaning allies in real life - and there is no tolerance for racism here. If you encounter any racism at all, you can report it as malice, and the person will be removed from the site. With this in mind, it would be easy to say that "every group is for black people", but I think that misses an important thing that I will probably struggle with talking about; I'll take a stab at what I mean:
I have strong positive feelings for @Deimos as a person and as an administrator, and I honestly believe that he is explicitly anti-racist to the best of his ability, and will always work hard to remove racism and prejudice from Tildes any time he sees it, but, to the best of my knowledge, he's a white guy and there are things that white guys just don't understand. I say this as a white guy with a black daughter - I'm doing my best to understand, because the person who is most important to me in the whole world has to deal with things that I just don't have to deal with, but I know that there are things that I don't know, and things that I know that I know I don't understand. Communities with black leadership are just different from communities with white leadership.
Tildes will, for the foreseeable future and probably forever, have one leader, and (again, to the best of my knowledge) he isn't black, so I think Tildes will always not be a place with black-run communities that are intended for black people. However, I think it is a place where black people are explicitly welcome and encouraged to join, and that while there are a lot of "white dudes in tech" here, we will always benefit from more people with different voices, so I hope that this is a place that can be recognized as a good, anti-racist community.
I am quite new here so maybe I am not understanding the philosophy of everything. But as you said black people have perspectives that non-black people do not. Perspectives about this website and perspectives about everything else outside this website. It seems completely reasonable to me to have a community for people to discuss those those perspectives.
First, it is a great ideal for Tildes to achieve an anti-racist platform. I haven’t seen anything bad here yet, but I think the unfortunate reality is that racist content will appear from time to time and need to be addressed. As you mentioned, non-black people (myself included) may not always recognize when it is happening. It seems important for the people targeted by such content to have a community to discuss it.
Second, and maybe more importantly, black communities have a lot more to share and talk about than racist content on this website.
I completely agree with everything you said. I do want to say that I would prefer that black people's perspectives be in the main groups thats most relevant to the discussion. I would love it if in tildes.health, people where sharing articles about how Black Americans have different perspectives on healthy living. I would love it if there were black voices in tildes.games.tabletop; that would be awesome!
Of course, if Black people want their own space, I'm not going to stop them. I would just love it if the regular spaces weren't presumed white by default. Where to hear black perspectives, you'd have to go to a different side of the website.
Maybe I should be more explicit - black people are 100% welcome here, and I would love for there to be large contingent of black people in all discussions, and for there also to be places specifically for black people to discuss things that are relevant for them.
However, the reality is that Tildes has one "leader". None of the communities are led by community members; they are all lead by the site administrator. As such, you can't really have a black-led community on Tildes, because the singular leader of the site is not black. Even if we were to, for example, have a group called ~bipoc, it would not be a black-led community. While I believe it would be a positive non-BIPOC-led community for all BIPOC constituents, it would still be non-BIPOC-led.
Unfortunately, I think there isn't a solution to this; the issue is intrinsic to Tildes, because groups have no "owners", and because of the privacy-based features of the site.
Due to this unsolvable issue, I think the best Tildes can hope for is a place that fosters a positive community for all people, so long as those people also care about fostering positivity.
Very true and something I didn't touch on in my comment as the black-focused communities I moderate are viewed through those mod-colored glasses and, thinking about it now, I see less of the content of the communities and more of the actions within it as I work to keep the place clean, safe, and on-topic.
Hey. I'm a black man and Tildes user for some time. It's in my bio and I mention my race from time to time when it's relevant. I'm pretty satisfied with the way Tildes currently works in regards to groups. I'm not sure a group for black culture would make a lot of sense at the moment, but a group for discussions regarding race in general might. The same logic by which we have ~lgbt could be applied to ~race. That said, I would be glad to see more black related content on Tildes, and that is something you can bring with or without a dedicated group.
And welcome to Tildes :)
I totally agree. A ~race or ~culture group where people can talk about shared experiences with one another would be a huge boon, imo. Like someone mentioned above, there's more to it than "You don't have to worry about that here." While I sincerely believe that, and am grateful for this lovely community, I think a place to discuss shared cultural experiences, good or bad, would be a good thing to think about.
I personally lean towards a ~culture, or maybe a subgroup of ~lifestyle, that focuses on these aspects. Could canopy topics of race, ethnicity, culture, etc.
Basically what Augustus Ferdinand said, but I will add you can see some background on previous discussions the community has had on new groups. There is one from 2021 and one from 2019
I expect after the new wave of users has settled in it will be time for another one of these threads once we have a better idea about the size, shape, and rough mix of interests that the community has.
In the 2019 discussion I proposed creating a group specifically for women that ended up getting more pushback than I expected. I think there were some valid points made on the other side of it, you can feel free to check out the feedback, some of which might overlap with with having a ~black group.
I disagree with most of them but I get where they're coming from honestly. One of the strongest was that since everyone is, by default, subscribed to all groups there isn't really any meaningful differentiation of the community within subgroups. At most you just get a vague signal as to how appropriate or needed your individual contribution might be (as with ~lgbt where it's regarded as sort of a matter of courtesy to not straight the place up too much).