Nick

god, this. so much. this is very well put

I would put it: safety isn't a property of spaces, or of people, of even of communities, it's a property of behaviours. People's feeling of safety on the site is always a matter of how the community is behaving now, (as well as its recent track record); there's no resting on our laurels.

good, important stuff to be talking about. one thing about "safety" when we're not talking about the most fundamental, purely physical definitions is that it depends on shared sense of norms and values. there are some topics and modes of behavior that consenting adults engage in and consider safe, even safety-affirming (because they feel free and comfortable enough) that other adults find inherently unsafe. how do you square those differences in norms? content warnings as a deep, platform-level feature are obviously a great tool for that particular case, but there are no silver bullets for these questions.

ultimately it's up to the site's owners and all of us using it to collectively shape those shared norms and values, reiteratively, forever - "working to keep them so" as you put it. i signed up here last june largely because i trusted the ASSC folks and liked what people were posting and the general vibe, and i've continued to do so as it's grown.

and yeah i think "good faith engagement is the default" is a shared value that this site currently has that twitter very much doesn't. and i think the main difference is that twitter, as a capitalist enterprise that wants only to grow and profit infinitely and harvest ever more data etc etc, never wanted to be seen as having values of its own, because it might be forced to stand by those values in a way that loses it money. ASSC has a major leg up in that regard because they're not trying to scale to 1 billion users or whatever.

Mastodon is having this same discourse right now, partly because a lot of the existing pre-Twitter-Migration userbase are techno-optimists who are absolutely convinced that Mastodon's design and existing community norms inherently deflect and dispel abuse, and they're currently getting Eternal Novembered

I think ultimately that there will be some level of toxic subcultures present on cohost, but without a global feed people will be better equipped to maintain more healthy subcultures among their friends and tags.

You know what, fair enough. This may have just been my anxiety talking.

too positive

ok. sign me up. where do i sign.

Yeah this is sort of what I wanted to say but didn't have time to in my first share of this post because I was already late getting to the pool; as important as it is to be wary of Toxic Positivity you absolutely cannot force yourself to be so vigilant of that that it ruins your ability to experience Genuine Positivity. Like I know we're all used to kind of gritting our teeth and giving each other tight, wry smiles through the entire Twitter experience because we all KNOW it fucking sucks there but there's nowhere else to go so whaddaya gonna do about it, but shit has actually been pretty tight here and it's okay to let yourself (and others) bask in that

The sense of safety here, for me, isn't one of "I can't say hard things", but, "I feel safer being vulnerable", at least at the moment.

something we try to root our our criticism in, is as a warning of an outcome to avoid, and as a damnation of the status quo and tendencies, not as an immediate issue to be handled right now.

The bottom paragraph, YES.

I was so suspicious, hell, even my brain started a countdown timer for the inevitable implosion of the site's userbase because it was way too chill.

man there were absolutely a couple bozos i wanted to catapult off here in the comments of the community guidelines post. then i told them off and muted them and went on with my life, as it should be

i'm also wait and see, but am cautiously optimistic that the moderation model will be reasonably successful, or at least, will be adapted to scale over time.

I'm not sure I remember seeing someone refer to Cohost as a "safe space" before this subject came up. But what I have observed so far is that it is generally a kind one. I think that is a good foundation on which we can intentionally build something better than what we've had before.

re: "We've read about the Missing Stairs, about Competing Access Needs, about Hot Allostatic Load. We wish Isabel Fall were part of our community."

so i've read The missing stair. which is what i think you're referring to since it's a pretty ubiquitous concept in whatever sphere i'm in, but i don't know what you're referring to with Competing Access Needs except the concept, and i don't know what you're referring to with Hot Allostatic Load at all. i do know about isabel fall, though, because that was recent enough and big enough that i was paying attention and remember it. (i've been active on the internet since ~2016, although i think i have a lot more internet historical knowledge than most people who became active around then).

anyway, what is it that you're referring to with Competing Access Needs and Hot Allostatic Load?