Black lives matter, as do all lives. The recent public discussions have effected positive change all around the world, and also in the tech world. As per IETF Recommendation the use of “blacklist / whitelist” and “master / slave” are now actively discouraged.
On our awesome-humane-tech page we already used the term “blocklist” thanks to @gkrishnaks suggestion, except where the product name explicitly contained ‘blacklist’. Now, matomo.org changed the name of their referrer spam blocker, and all occurrences are finally gone.
Furthermore I changed the Github branch name from master to main (which will probably become Github’s default for new repositories), and also did so for the delightful project on Codeberg (which is based on Gitea that has main as default already implemented).
There are a number of other repositories that still need to be modified, but that will come in due time. I am a bit hesitant to delete the master branch with these, as that will break URL’s in old discussion threads we have had over time (images).
This is great. Society must change which includes the tech industry. Black lives matter really aims to highlight the depth of brutality, injustice and unaccountability that american society, especially law enforcement, harbors toward black people. In brief it is a society that not regard black lives as worthy of protection. There is systemic racism all over.
Thanks for pointing this out. It is ultra sad how language has been politicized and even weaponised this way. The BLM discussion is way broader than the scope of this forum, and an important one to be had at that. Yet by casually referring to it while introducing a simple best-practice to improve inclusiveness I violated the rule to leave specific politics out of humanetech discourse. I’ll close this thread to avoid further discussion that only serves to detract from the recommendation given in the first post. I changed the title of this topic.
What I do like to mention before closing this is where this touches humanetech: the reality where our social media are the enablers and amplifiers that allow things to deteriorate to a point where reasonable discussion and critical thinking is no longer possible, and truth and facts no longer matter. These media are open to be gamed and abused by anyone who wishes to do so for their own purposes, political or otherwise. This is the biggest threat humanity faces, and the biggest challenge for humanetech. In a private conversation with Tristan Harris in May 2018 he stated:
“I do not want to scare people, but we are here to help avoid civic breakdown and prevent future wars”
As we see now this was no exaggeration. In our last reorganization of the community we decided to focus on solutions, and in follow-up discussions I’d like to see solution-focus be part of the main topic, or otherwise the discussions will just get stuck as they do in so many other places on the web.