I founded a dating app called Thurst, launched a beta in 2017. I shut that same beta down a few months later because of overwhelming threats and harassment to the small, but dedicated user base of 15,000. I realized that many social platforms and dating apps lacked an adequate let alone radical protocol for keeping users, particularly marginalized users safe. I've been developing a way to address harassment, abuse, and name and detect patterns of violence on platforms. Most platforms, apps, and online spaces are inherently hierarchical and therefore inherently stratified in terms of privilege, access, safety, and usability. My talk will talk about a few practices, paradigms, and tools my team and I use to better understand how to reduce harassment and violence.

This talk will discuss the need for the radical imagination in the context of the survival of marginalized communities - from utilizing various platforms as diasporic bridges to challenging the status quo in order to subvert traditional oppressive structures. We will focus on how critical it is for marginalized people to create tools, software, and collectives in order to determine and enhance our futures as well as the need to make the aforementioned tools and spaces more accessible, so that we as marginalized people can both decolonize and collectivize on deeper, more intentional levels.