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By affordances, I mean in the STS sense which is parallel to the husserlian sense as enabling a human agent to extend themselves through an environment.

This bit is important because I understand digital environments, like social media, in the truest sense of the word "environment." And this is where the Deweyan comes out: organisms, communities, cultures exist by means of an environment, through transaction with it.

This is important for my critique of mastodon.

(This is also important for my transactional theory of social media, coming soon whenever the fuck I clear this current slate of papers.)

When I say that a community emerges by means of the environment, I do not mean that the community structures form in response to the environment. I mean that the communities, and the organisms within them, incorporate the environment into themselves to maintain their patterns of action.

This is also true of social media as an environment. The affordances of a platform are what enable communities for form by means of how they enable transactions among members.

This gets me to the affordances that are crucial to the formation of things like Black Twitter, like Disability Twitter: hashtags and quote tweets.

Now, some of this has been overcome through the addition of the ability to follow a hashtag, which itself is a recent invention. Hashtags, as Andre Brock notes, enable users to become identified with a conversation. They allow the conversation to take shape by means of the environment.

They do not do this alone, however.

So, Mastodon's incorporation of the hashtag gets us part of the way to robust community formation like we had on twitter. It lays a ground work, but it does not enable the community formation in the same way because of the other affordances of the platform.

Remember, communities form by means of their environment. Users take up the resources of the digital space to transform it into a cultural space capable of supporting this.

I say part of the way, because absent some mechanism for "call and response," for playing the dozens, for becoming involved in conversations in the ways that the quote tweet enables, many Black digital practices will be stymied.

Put another way, the environment will be unable to support the kind of cultural practices that enabled the formation of libidinally or affectively black spaces. And this is before we get to the ways the federated model increases the distance between users.

To conclude, I'm not saying all of this to present mastodon in an unfair light: I'm saying all of this to make clear that the affordances of the platform impede how cultural groups will be able to use the "raw materials" of the platform to form their communities.

I'm saying this to make clear the ways that mastodon is a different kind of environment, and these differences matter to how marginalized groups use the affordances to form community.

I'm also saying this because many of the counter arguments to the formation of communities by marginalized folks on this platform ignore the culturally specific ways that these users take up the resources of the platform.

On the bird site, I used Yancy's ontological expansion of whiteness to explain that, and I do believe that this tracks. That is, the assumption that works for white users, even white queer users, will work for everyone.

And this assumption, I think, is one of the crucial cultural barriers that needs to be overcome IF we want mastodon to be a "home" for folks who are not in the power majority.

Now, I am aware of the design history of Mastodon, that queer folks had a hand in the development of the protocol. As a black queer man, I can tell you first hand that queerness is no bulwark against the inheritance and reproduction of whiteness. Which is to say that this history is no argument against the present.

Anyway, keep an eye out as I port over a whole collection of critiques about the platform and its ability to support certain kinds of communities.