hey this thing is a bit rambly and there's some pacing I'd tighten up if I had the will for it. If i had more time, I'd write a shorter post, as the saying goes. If you feel your eyes glaze over, maybe skip a paragraph or two; that said, the post:
i used to get all up in my head about these things, worried about what i should and shouldnt be putting warnings on, worried i was about to get drop kick cancelled for getting one a bit wrong. socials did weird shit to me when i was pinning my self worth to a follow count i'll tell ya that. been thinkin about content warnings now and then though.
so like the first factor here is, stuff like cohost, mastodon, twitter, w/e, theres are all one-to-many posting platforms. I'm saying some stuff in this lil text box here, and it's going out to all of you people reading it right now. There's no way for me to tailor my feed individually to any of you, and I don't try to.
But because it's all showing up in your feed, you can kinda trick yourself into feeling like it was tailored for you. Not on purpose, right? It's just a funny lil brain thing. I'm writing "you" right now referring to lots of people, but whoever is reading this is gonna read it far more directly than I'm writing it. It's an inherently parasocial thing, up until the point where maybe you write a reply on the post, I reply to your reply, then it's a conversation.
So in the mire of this gray area, content warnings sort of act as a compromise. When I'm writing, I have an idea of the types of folks I broadly want to write for, and I try to keep my stuff compatible with them. But now and then I wanna talk about a topic that ventures outside the broader set, or that I know bothers a particular friend of mine following me, or something like that, and that's when I bust out the content warning. But primarily I write for me, so if I would want it to be content-warned, then I content warn it.
And the important bit there to me is that these content warnings are kinda personal to my own feed. I might content warn stuff that other people don't, others might content warn stuff that I don't, and I might even follow different rules across different cohost pages / mastodon accounts / etc.
But if someone scrolling by sees something I posted and its not behind a content warning, but they think it should be, well that can kinda suck for them. And in the context of the parasocial feed relationship, it can feel like an aggression. How dare I not content warn something that bothers you! If we had an existing relationship, and I was doing this stuff in a DM when you had asked me not to, it would seem like a pretty clear violation of boundaries.
But this isn't a DM, and I'm not carrying on a conversation with anyone in particular.
I've often see people treat follows as friend-requests, and I think this is born out of the fact that stuff like twitter, mastodon, now cohost, these things dont have a baked in concept of a "friend", so people have a tendency to latch on to the closest analog and treat it as such. The culture of "mufos" (mutual followers) as sort of a close social group. I used to feel like that, but nowadays it kinda sketches me out.
I've seen people feel offended when someone unfollows them, as if they'd been ghosted in a DM. Or offended/paranoid because someone they're friends with doesn't follow them. Hell, I've felt that way too.
Two parasocial relationships don't automatically create one direct relationship, not without work from both parties to turn it into one. But it sure is easy to trick oneself into feeling like they do.
The way I see it, you could literally be my girlfriend, but if you don't like what I'm writing on my feed, you shouldn't be following me. 'course, people closer to me, if they ask me to make some changes to how I'm posting, I'm liable to listen to them, but that's because they already have an existing relationship with me. But like, I've got friends whose feeds I follow, and friends whose feeds I don't.
Some people, I love to spend time with them, but 90% of the things they post on their feed are things I'd rather not be on the receiving end of. And I'm fine with that. That feed is for them, it's not for me. If they want me specifically to see something, they'll send it to me directly in a chat we're in.
Same shit for shares/reblogs/boosts/RTs/whatever we're calling them now. One feature from mastodon that I miss here is the ability to hide shared-posts from my feed based on the person doing the share. Some people, they share posts I like seeing. Others, they very frequently share things I would very much never like to see. If I don't have any other tool to deal with it, I'll unfollow them if I have to!
It occurs to me now writing this that this sort of social problem doesn't really exist on blogs because on my personal blog, I have no idea who's following my RSS feed, and there's no expectation that they know that. Anything I post there is between me and my own authorial compass.
As they say in da share zone: just walk out! you can leave! My general belief is if I don't like what someone's posting, I shouldn't be following them, and that goes double if its someone I care about. 'cause if I keep following someone I care about whose posts give me brain bads, I start resenting them in a way that has nothing to do with anything they actually did to me. It bleeds over to my actual relationship with them. It's not good.
So it's very important to me that I remind myself of the dynamic at play here. That these are just a bunch of personal sites, all packaged up in a convenient little web interface. It's the only way I keep my head on right.
