There is perennial discussion about what fediverse servers (Lemmy or otherwise) to recommend to new users. I have a proposal, perhaps not very original but I haven't seen it made often.

Let's just recommend that newbies pick an instance that is located close to them geographically. That's to say: their country, their region, or (ideally) their town.

Some context. Personally, I am not totally sold on social media, federated or otherwise. The evidence is now pretty clear that it causes major social harms. One way it does this is by fuelling polarization around hot-button national and international debates, at the expense of local issues. Reviving democracy is going to mean boosting communities at a local level. This could be a small way to do that.

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[–] fastfinge@rblind.com 33 points 3 days ago (1 children)

If we look at how toxic and racist the local city groups are on Reddit or Facebook, I'm not sure this is a good model. If I'm a black trans woman living in a small town in Mississippi, my local instance might not even be a safe place, for me.

Similarly, I would encourage blind folks to join us at rblind.com rather than a local instance, because a local instance might not take our needs into account: many have captchas, some use inaccessible themes, etc. At rblind.com you can be sure that we won't deploy an update or configuration change that will break accessibility, because the server admins and moderators are all blind ourselves. But the beauty of federation means that you can talk to everyone else on other instances, so being part of a particular identity group doesn't limit you to just talking to other members of that group.

[+] BackgrndNoize@lemmy.world -7 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Well the solution to living in a toxic locality isn't just to seclude yourself and stick to non local social networks, things only improve if you try to improve them despite the hostility and resistance, you have to take up space and confront those racists and homophones locally, but at the same time I see no reason to stay away from larger non local platforms that are supportive and help you

[–] fastfinge@rblind.com 10 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Sarcasm: Yup. The black people who were lynched should have just participated in local communities and confronted the KKK! That'll fix everything!

Anyway, online isn't the place to take up space and confront people. You do that in person. Online is where you come to get support, encouragement, and resources for the in-person fight. And that doesn't work if your online profile is also local. For many people, there online participation cannot, and should not, be geographically local. Remember the "good old days" of the local BBS that you had to dial into? Isn't it interesting that every single documentary full of sepia toned reminiscences about how wonderful those local communities were is entirely created by and featuring old middle-class white dudes? No women, no homosexuals or transsexuals, no people with disabilities, and no ethnic minorities? I wonder why!

Again, speaking from personal experience: blind people had NFBNet, but it wasn't local. And the local BBS's had so much ASCII art and other accessibility issues that we couldn't participate.

And now, on local Reddits and Facebook groups, nobody uses alt text. I guess that's my fault for not participating in a space that is completely inaccessible to me. I'm the problem with democracy!

[–] zaugofficial@lemmings.world 0 points 14 hours ago

Hold on a second.

Black people fought tooth and nail for their freedom and equal rights.

[–] BackgrndNoize@lemmy.world -1 points 2 days ago

Didn't black people intentionally go into segregated venus and refuse to leave in order to confront the racists and push back against the discrimination, I'm not saying you need to fight for inclusion in online spaces, I meant in real life