Another day, another website with a pervasive racist environment! :) Don't get me wrong, [[2020-09-13-thoughts-on-mastodon-and-how-it-really-is-crumbling-actually-take-it-seriously|this isn't the first time]] and it definitely won't be the last. And I'm not going to get into the logistics of what happened here. The article above is more than enough.[^1] I'm focusing on something more specific today. And that something is **bitterness**. --- Hopping off Cohost isn't that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things. In the words of Tyler the Creator: "nigga just walk away from the screen like nigga close your eyes haha." I don't need Cohost as a public online space, or any public online space really, because I have my friends on discord, my personal forum, and my wonderful future wife to keep me company. I guess I'm just tired of stumbling upon a place that I think will be fun to hang out in, that is ostensibly leftist, but is too white to ever escape being racist as fuck. "Fool me twice," and all that. That certainly makes me bitter. But what makes me more bitter, however illogical it might be, is that the internet just moves on. I don't want to be, or expect to be missed. I have way too much anxiety to simultaneously be that prideful. But my time with Cohost is just a quiet reminder that a website's inability to handle its own problems with gross racist harassment doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things. It will keep it pushing as long as POCs continue to quietly be driven out. If a mass exodus of Cohost's primarily white, techy userbase occurred, you bet your fucking ass people would be talking about it. The staff themselves would be scrambling to figure things out. In contrast, getting one more uppity darky realizing that they don't want to deal with unprompted racism on their own, or other peoples' posts, and subsequently leaving? A drop in the bucket. We don't need that guy's Cohost Plus sub, we have [INSERT FIERCE DEFENDER OF THE SITE HERE] to continue to preach the website's gospel and bring new people in. I already have a pretty good expectation of what's going to happen when I post this. Lots and lots of pontificating from whites who can write paragraphs about how everyone is the problem except for them. Who think that posting "punch a facist!!! 🤪🤪💖🦖" online is the same for praxis as helping out in a food kitchen. That is boring. So are polite, albeit well-meaning, "bye!" comments. I don't need any of that y'all. I need you to protect your POC friends. I need you to think about how *you* contribute to a hostile culture online. Racism isn't just someone on Twitter calling me a nigger. It's: - Seeing a comment about racism and complaining about how it's "not all white people" - Arguing about the slightest bit of racisim-based criticism in media - Spending more time being smug about not keeping up with racism on a website than dealing with it - Describing a POC's criticism about a website as *wielding a gun*[^2] - Letting racists run rampant on your website until staff gets publicly called out on it. And on and on and on. I dunno, I'm just yapping now. I don't even have a way to properly end this because in the grand scheme of things: will this ever truly end? Probably not until I stop trying to be public online or build my own version of Wakanda. Anyways. Be nice to each other. Catch you later. [^1]: I read this back in preparation for writing this and frankly. It's basically 1:1 LMFAO. Just replace "Mastodon" with "Cohost." Cool world. [^2]: Sorry I can never let this one go. Absolutely unhinged behavior and that was basically it!