the other side of 'its not twitter, chill out' is letting down your guard a bit so you aren't as jumpy when someone does misstep having basically no context but still wanting to interact

some people might be looking for fights but like 90% of my 'negative' interactions are interesting disagreement not people grabbing knives because they go 0-100% out of necessity from previous interactions proving the need

proportional response never seems proportional on the receiving end, and just causes people to escalate in a spiral. you can still be mad and angry and confrontational, just, you know, be a little mindful there if the person is coming in to directly undermine your point in particular or whatever or if they are trying to tease something out in the juxtaposition of both of your viewpoints/context-collections

maybe i'm just blocked by most of the people who go looking for fights by now, but I don't think I've had more than ten interactions in the past year that weren't in good faith on the part of the poster, even if it was very pointed and they probably should have assumed a bit more good faith on my part.

but like, its really hard to do interpersonal-politics here just due to the nature of how hard it is to find posts, or know your followers' general vibe at any given time, so there's not much room for bad faith to flourish in general unless people are doing it off-site, and even then, its much harder to use that to then crawl your personal social network looking for fights.

just a thing to remember. you can put down the rhetorical and metaphorical weapons, they act as an accelerate not a deterrent.

edit: and if some reply isn't that, silence their post or block them. your followers aren't likely to see it, and if they do, they already have context on your end too. its fine. they'll evolve or perish, people seem to tire quickly of the low effort stuff bad faith posts tend to be made of these days. Hard to build up the group righteousness when you can't find a post you made ten posts ago, you know?