Even though millions of people left Twitter in 2023 – and millions more are ready to move as soon as there’s a viable alternative – the fediverse isn’t growing.1 One reason why: today’s fediverse is unsafe by design and unsafe by default – especially for Black and Indigenous people, women of color, LGBTAIQ2S+ people2, Muslims, disabled people and other marginalized communities.
As I understand it, because it requires harm to be experienced before the negating action is taken.
A parallel might be having malware infect a system before it can be identified and removed (harm experienced -> future harm negated), vs proactively preventing malware from infecting the system in the first place (no harm experienced before negation).
Which is exactly how the real world works. Harm has to be identified to suggest solutions. Otherwise you‘re becoming the helicopter parent that denies their kid every opportunity to learn and cause allergies and other bad outcomes. Translated back to the fediverse: it is great the way it is and improvements are always encouraged. We have much bigger and more pressing issues. This is not it.
According to the submission, some harms have been identified, and some solutions have been suggested [that could reduce the same and similar harms from occurring to new and existing users] (but mostly it sounds like a “more work needs to be done” thing).
I imagine your perspective on the issues being discussed are different from those of the author. The helicopter parent analogy makes sense in a low-danger environment; I think what the author has suggested is that some people don’t feel like it’s a low-danger environment for them to be in (though I of course – not being the author or one such person – may be mistaken).
Edit: [clarified] because I realised it might seem contradictory if read literally.
This makes sense, especially considering the features the author cited. The by design parts may just be for clickbait purposes