eevee

I think that's just inherent to any social media. That make me sad, I used to believe this wasn't the case. I wish there was a place where people could be more calm and give the benefit of the doubt to people, but I think while system does influence behaviour a lot, this is just something that is inherent to any social media site. I wish I could have more mature discussion with strangers, I genuinely like talking to strangers, but unfortunately, that's just how it is on the web.

I didn't take part in the recent discussions, but reading it and witnessing some of the aftermath has sorta undermined some of the magic of the site for me as well. I knew things like that would happen eventually even here, and I still like the site for its welcoming of longer posts at the end of the day, but it leaves me with this vague gut feeling that something happened here that I assumed wouldn't happen here.

I've always been worried, meow.
As soon as people landed here they were already always talking about how cool it was how nobody was having discourse at the same time as talking shit about how mastodon people punish people who don't CW sensitive topics, and there wasn't a single moment of self reflection and I knew it wasn't going to end well.

turns out that having a community attempt to self-police itself through “good intentions” is not enough to keep a space friendly and positive

I'd hope that people will continue to make thoughtful posts until that becomes more of a convention here, rather than leaving yet more of the internet to be overrun with heckin epic memes and 5 TERRIBLE RUMORS that will SHOCK you!!!, but recognize that that can be a lot of effort for very little apparent reward. Doing pretty much anything well increasingly feels like that, the alternative just seems incredibly grim.

putting a whole bunch of people who are often significantly traumatized and sometimes also self‐righteous in a bad way into one box can be volatile. unfortunately, given enough people in a space, volatility is unavoidable in my experience. if you pour enough different chemicals into the same vat it will eventually catch fire.

i think one thing people specifically don’t react well to here is seeing other people get real mad about something (at least for things which aren’t universally condemned here), particularly when their initial response to seeing anger doesn’t let them absorb the context. i am fairly mellow in public, so i have been doing well here for the most part. but one time when i let my frustration and distaste with something show here, someone immediately tried to pick a fight with me. (i ignored them.)

i still consider this better than the alternative public access spaces that freely permit gross bigotry, or toxic communities where everyone’s just flaming mad about everything all the time. but there’s never any “magic” on the internet, just leftist communities with various controls to limit interactions from the public (notification/CW/tag filters, post silencing, comment/share locking, private pages…), which are the closest you get in my experience.