Phosphor [&]

Here's another long rambly Reddit crosspost! Someone asked if plural Discords were generally safe spaces, and I accidentally a very roughshod handbook on safety, oversharing, and how we really shouldn't be making garden-variety assholes into boogeymen.

Hmm, my thoughts are going in all sorts of directions for this. Let me see if I can pin some of them down.

First: there are no totally safe spaces.

There are safer spaces where it's less likely you'll encounter a certain kind of harassment, but no space is watertight, and the more open to public membership a space is, the more unpredictable it is as a rule. I'm not just talking about the risk that a troll might infiltrate and take screenshots to crosspost to a cringe subreddit, or even the risk of there being a capital-A Abuser in the community, but rather... the risk that things will go sour, and that people will handle it poorly, and you'll be left feeling the emotional equivalent of being scraped raw all over, metaphorically thrown out of your house with all your treasured belongings still inside.

I feel like an alarming number of people join supposed safe spaces and immediately unload all their vulnerabilities when really, some things are better kept close to your chest, especially in semi-public spaces. On that note...

Second: it's a valuable skill to stop and think before you share something.

I don't know what y'all want to share in those spaces, but based upon your fear of being posted to a cringe subreddit, my assumption is that it's something you feel pretty vulnerable about. So, let me walk you through a thought exercise that I do whenever I think about sharing something:

• Why do you want to share this information? Are you presenting your story to someone else to reassure them that they're not alone? Do you feel a need to "confess" something and be validated?
• What parts of this information make you feel vulnerable, and why? If you were, say, talking about a fun date you had with a headmate who's a fictive, is it the dating part that makes you nervous? The fictive part? Both?
• Is there anything here that doesn't need sharing in order to communicate what you want to communicate? For example, if you were talking about sources, you could name the media without naming the specific characters.
• Is sharing this information likely to get you what you want? This is one that I especially recommend thinking about if you're sharing because you want validation. Let's say you share some weird system experience you had because you wanted reassurance that you were "normal." You get reassured that it is, and that's cool and all, but are you going to do this every time you have an odd experience? Do you want to turn to outsiders for validation every time?
• What's the worst that could happen if this information escapes containment? Say, if there is a troll who's infiltrated and is crossposting everything to a cringe subreddit, or if things go sour between you and the community. Which brings me to...

Third: what's actually the worst that can happen?

This is a genuine question! Like, don't get me wrong, it never feels great to catch the mockery of a bunch of Internet strangers, and stalking is a real concern. But let's say you do get posted to a cringe subreddit. In the vast, vast majority of cases, people who were already assholes will look at the post, have themselves a little asshole laugh... and then move on to their next source of asshole entertainment, forgetting about you along the way. And if you don't check the subreddits yourself (and if no one tells you about it) you will NEVER KNOW. And that's not terrible, actually!

Again, like, I understand why people are anxious, and I want to make clear that just being posted there now and then is a different ballpark than being stalked, doxxed, etc. But while I feel like acknowledging the harm is good, it's also important to acknowledge that in many cases, being posted is not something that will have any effect on you, and that making what's basically a bunch of losers making fun of actual children into, idk, some omnipresent boogeyman is giving them a lot more power than they deserve over you. And yeah, it's just frustrating in general that these things exist, but also, bigotry against plurals was a thing before them and would have been a thing without them, and either way, people have been horrible gossips since the beginning of time.

Anyway, cringe subreddits aside, it's good to think about other reasons you have for not wanting things to escape containment. For example, if you're a minor, you might be living under unaccepting parents who will abuse you over being plural; if you're working, you might be anxious about it getting out to your workplace; and so on. If this is a concern, and you use your Discord for a bunch of IRL stuff, then it might be worth making an alt and making sure you don't disclose details like your legal name, birthday, location, and so forth. (You shouldn't be disclosing those things anyway, but I digress.)

If you're afraid various friends will find out that you're plural and give you grief over it, that's understandable, but also consider: do you actually want to be friends with people who give you grief over your identity? Like, all friendships will have their share of friction, but that's on the scale of like... having an occasional miscommunication. Not "I have to hide who I really am around them or they'll bully me," or "they have a narrow idea of how the world works and get angry when I don't fit into it." Friends who treat you badly are not friends.

It's easier said than done to leave a rancid friendship, but if you can, you'll be doing yourself a favor in the long run by freeing up more time and energy to spend on people who actually respect you. (And if you can't leave a friendship for whatever reason, you can still set boundaries. Spend less time around them, leave a hangout if they start pushing you around, and so forth.)

Finally: learn how to gauge safety for yourself.

This is a whole other post and I've written too much as is, but just as a few rules of thumb: don't assume shared identity = safety, look at how people handle "no" rather than how they handle "yes," don't be quick to dismiss your own discomfort, and it's always okay to lurk and hold back on interaction while you assess the space. And as scary as it might be, don't restrict yourself to plurals only when looking for communities and friends. You'll be missing out on a lot of cool people.

Hope that helps!