lori

@lori

customize your hot cakes with syrup

lori @lori5/27/2023, 11:38 PM

My main takes on the latest Takes are pretty secondary but:

I've seen multiple people say "there aren't transphobes/Nazis/etc. on cohost". Extremely dangerous. Believing that is the first step to them getting away with being here. They're everywhere. Some of them just keep their mouths shut enough to not get banned.
The constant evoking of Mastodon in these CW discussions is so pointless. Half the people doing so haven't been on Mastodon since 2017 (which was a wildly different landscape) and you have to remember how Mastodon works. Replace "Mastodon" with "Forums" and you'll see why. "Forum culture is batshit with how they handle CWs!" as if forums don't wildly differ. I was on Mastodon in 2017 and have been back to it for over a year now. I never see the weird CW debates. I'm sure they happen, somewhere, but I never see it, and it's bizarre to think the entire fediverse is like that. My instance just requires CWs on a handful of things like NSFW content, alcohol...normal stuff. The "CW eyelashes" or whatever shit I keep hearing about just...doesn't exist to me. I'm sure it exists somewhere but it does so in the same way Gab exists out there somewhere, I never see it and I'd argue most mastodon users don't encounter this kind of thing. I think it has more to do with certain social circles than Mastodon or Fedi. And I don't bring this up out of a strong need to defend Fedi, it's not perfect, but Cohost's problems are Cohost's problems, most people here haven't used Mastodon and it is not affecting how they behave here. Assuming it's some sort of reaction to a small subset of Fedi instances that go to far with CWs means misidentifying the cause. It's really not relevant to what I've seen argued here.
I've said it before and I'll say it again--issues like this cannot be solved by changing the way the site works. Social problems cannot be solved via code. You need social solutions. Conversation, moderation, leadership...that's what it requires. If people don't care to CW something, and you think they should CW it, you either need to convince them they should care about it, or they need to be misdated to care about it whether they want to or not. No change to tagging systems will solve the issue of "I Don't Want To Do It".

#meta #cohost meta #mastodon #social media #discourse

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in reply to @lori's post:

walking mirage @atomicthumbs5/27/2023, 11:59 PM

i don't have much energy to argue and don't intend to fight, just provide clarifications for my own thinking since i've been loud about all this:

we're all aware they can be, but i've always seen "there aren't any transphobes here" as shorthand for "there aren't supposed to be any here," since it's the only social media platform I know of that bans them outright
my main point of reference here is an acquaintance who got harrassed off their instance for not CWing a selfie; to quote them, "this is a real problem within the broad culture there. it was never explained to me why my face was so offensive i had to hide it from everyone, just an expected behavior i was supposed to have already known about. very alienating"
this was implicit in my feature idea writeup but i've added a paragraph making it explicit

lori @lori5/28/2023, 12:06 AM

I don't really have much to add for 1 and 3, but for 2 I will say that that is a problem with that instance, not mastodon. I've posted un-CW'd selfies, frankly I barely CW anything outside of the small number of things my instance requires in their rules and it isn't a problem. It isn't a fedi wide issue, it's a problem with whatever social circle they are in within fedi. So I'm not arguing that isn't a problem, or isn't a bad community, but it isn't as much of a "Mastodon" as people seem to believe. I've been on a few different instances and I haven't been on one that was weird about that kind of thing since whatever short lived one I was on in 2016/2017. I don't think you can generalize Mastodon any more than you can forums, there are definitely certain forums that will be like that and others where there's nothing like that.

But the biggest reason I push against this idea in this particular case is because I've already seen people using it in the sense of "I thought we rejected this Mastodon idea of CWs!" While I do think it's a mischaracterization of mastodon, it doesn't really matter, because the point is people have internalized this idea of it being over the top on CWs to the point where they've gone so far in the other direction they don't want to CW basic stuff everyone has been CWing since CWs were a thing, like suicide. It's a bad framing of the situation to even bring mastodon up.

lori @lori5/28/2023, 12:10 AM

Sorry I feel like I wrote a novel (or it looks that way on my phone) but I feel like @xkeeper's recent post ties into this for me as well, the one about how on forums everyone sees the same thing but on a timeline based site everyone sees totally different stuff. On fedi that is multiplied by a thousand. Obviously my fedi experience won't be everyone's, but theirs isn't everyone's either. So I think fedi is a very hard place to try to generalize about. It doesn't make much sense to talk about what users or community moderation is like on Mastodon/Fedi most of the time, it mostly makes sense to talk about specific instances.

walking mirage @atomicthumbs5/28/2023, 12:10 AM

these are a very good set of points

lori @lori5/28/2023, 12:28 AM

And while I'm monologuing (sorry I like thinking out loud don't even take this as a direct reply to you personally) I think this is true for all platforms. I don't think it's actually useful to keep saying "we aren't Twitter!" on cohost or mastodon. A few too many people on mastodon spend too much time being Not Twitter and not enough time thinking about what it means to be the platform they actually are (for Mastodon that's going to be the specific instance unless it's a debate about code features). A lot of people on cohost similarly spend a lot of time discussing not being Twitter or not being Mastodon or not being Tumblr, but I think it's short sighted. Focusing on what you don't want to be doesn't necessarily mean being something good, it could just mean inventing a new way to be bad. And I get it and I'm not above falling into this thinking myself. But it's not productive imo.