the spirit is weak. woe be the spirit. the body is weaker still. Siërra R
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ask me about horses
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this is long but we do hope people will read and think about it
it's not any sort of final treatise on the correct way to do culture, culture is a living, breathing thing. but people just reading this and thinking about it is a big deal, a meaningful step to nudge things in good directions. hopefully we'll have more nudging opportunities over time.
I agree wiff teh post but I am still a bit worried about teh culture of cohost in general, meowf. Even teh OGs are a bit on edge here, and are too afraid of "discourse" happening.
At some point, a real controversy among users of this website will happen and this will be put to test.
i mean, the earliest controversy on here had to do with people questioning the terms of service, and that was a very real and bitter controversy at the time. still, people went on afterwards and made more chill and reasonable posts
I remain worried.
I have a lot of thoughts on this I am not willing to put down for my own mental health; hopefully my use of the word "real" did not seem belittling, but I have specific types of controversy in mind and that description was as specific as I was willing to get at this point.
I think as this website amasses more users, we’ll have more of these controversies.
Mild ones to start, but the more people you cram into one space, the more opinions and micro-opinions converge. And when dealing with sensitive or controversial topics, even people roughly on the same page as each other can cause offense.
I think this website is an experiment in optimism, and I like it. One can engage, block, or keep messages private. Every user will have to find their own groove. I feel you raise some really good points, though, and helping people adjust who are coming from Twitter is going to be a process. Completely different world.
Why are you thinking this? Isn't this is just an individual thing?
If a norm of "put this in your profile to say it's okay to talk to you" becomes sufficiently widespread, then there's a possibility people will also start to believe the converse: "people who don't put this in their profile don't want people to interact with them". I've seen this peripherally in online spaces: "trans people listing their pronouns" -> "cis people also listing pronouns to help normalize disclosing that sort of thing" -> "if someone doesn't list their pronouns they're suspicious".
Because in this line of reasoning, the norm of "if you support trans people then you put your pronouns in bio" implies "if you don't have pronouns in bio then you don't support trans people". That is, the norm transitions from optional to required; "everybody who does this supports trans people" becomes "everybody who supports trans people does this".
What @BeNotAfraid said. I was just describing how a well-intentioned thing can go wrong.
I think having pronouns in the bio is fine (I have mine in my bio on all my social media), and I don't think that people putting the "it's okay to talk to me" markers in their bios are harmful, I'm just explaining a route by which it could become harmful.
That's possible, but even so the argument against it seems to rest on an assumption that in a world without welcome mats everyone would just instinctively let themselves in, instead of everyone assuming they're unwelcome by default and ALSO people get upset if you explicitly say otherwise.
Cohost is not a forum. The default mode of posting on here isn't big open threads nobody owns and everyone jumps into and out of. It's making an announcement on your own personal page, which by default people who don't know you can't even find, and most of the regular accounts I've followed here who aren't literal staff or some kind of Twitter superstar have already spent months mostly talking to themselves. Getting a response from a stranger in the midst of your monologue here is already weird and unusual, even if welcome. The idea that there'd be some kind of unspoken culture of freewheeling dialogue here that nobody has to actively work to create or encourage might be appealing, but that's not how Cohost works and it's not how it will ever work.
This site is, de facto, an aggregation of smaller personal spaces with their own ingroup norms and preferences (not everyone wants to deal with the possibility of some rando swanning in and doing Discourse at them, the site is designed this way on purpose!), if you want to make new people comfortable in those spaces you have to make those preferences explicit.
To be clear, I don't actually care about this specific instance, I was just explaining how a norm of encouraging people to do X if they support trans people/are fine with random interactions could lead to some people concluding that anyone who doesn't do X doesn't support trans people/doesn't want random interactions.
IMO the problem of "I don't want randos in my comments" would be better solved by a "only let people I follow comment" option or something, because then you can go "this person is clearly fine with me commenting or they would have turned the option on". Same reason I'm fine with boosting anything I see on Mastodon: if they didn't want me to boost it, they would have turned on the option that disables that (though I would still ask if I thought it might be a mistake).
Sure, just saying people are going to get their social cues from somewhere, and by declining to express your position clearly you've just forfeited a say in how they'll do it. It's not like in the pre-pronouns internet it was reasonable to assume any given vague acquaintance was a staunch trans ally until proven otherwise, you'd just assume hostile by default unless and until they actually fuckin said something
I left a comment here disagreeing and enganged in a conversation. That got out of hand and I am sorry for taking the discussion there. Being inflammatory wasn't the intent, but it was the result. I have therefore deleted my comments.
