namelessWrench

The Only Rotten Dollhart Webring

A hideous fruit, disgracing itself.

Allo-Aro



DecayWTF
@DecayWTF

I have my own fediverse instance and now that I'm back to following more people over there: Yeah, the aggressively enforced "CW everything" social norm sucks ass because in practice what it means is that I have to click an extra time to see any post because there's nothing usefully conveyed by CWs if every post, no matter how innocuous, has them. All it's going to leave me with is feeling stupid and like it's my fault if I actually do click through something about (certain topics that really do sometimes hit hard) that actually gets under my skin. It makes CWs useless.


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in reply to @DecayWTF's post:

yep! also a single free text field is a poor choice of UI affordances for something that can consist of multiple independent concepts, and makes it impossible to do anything fancy with customizable visibility without text parsing

also your choices for annotating posts with topics of interest that you don't necessarily expect to be triggering are

  1. spending characters against the character limit on a hashtag
  2. overloading the content warning field, which is completely bizarre

So far I have determined the following:

  • Fediverse/Mastodon is 100000x better with a private instance (or I guess a small small small one that's just you and like your three friends would be fine too)
  • It's still bad for the same reasons IRC fragmented waaaaaaaaaay back in the mists of time: Unlimited and unrestricted federation is really easy for bad actors to exploit and a network needs to be able to govern itself. The fediverse federation model is entirely peer-to-peer with the result that you can't even quarantine off part of the network, you have to play eternal wackamole or have an instance that uses an allowlist model for federation.

this is what we were trying to get at with our earlier post on this, about how in practice the discourse around CWs isn't actually about providing consent for viewing triggering subjects, it's actually about white fragility and the preservation of individual personal comfort. it turns a useful tool into a cudgel that gets used to to enforce the cultural norms that in turn reinforce white supremacy (:

I mean, yeah, but also there are instances that have, taken in a vacuum, respectable policies about that (demanding marginalized people CW their own experiences is considered harassment or the like). The problem of course is that this in and of itself can be harmful because you create a contradiction where people have to out themselves as whatever marginalized or minoritized community they come from to be eligible for this "protection".

i should eventually use and post on the feds and masts enough to see the bad netiquette they have ppl complain about for myself, so far i'm still in the honeymoon phase, or rather the "well i sure see posts from people i follow" phase