twitch of twitch.cymru

i know people (me included) have criticised this site's userbase for being a self-declared queer leftist site but also containing ableists, racists, etc. but is it even possible to create a social media without those kinds of people? i think everywhere has them.

because i don't think that i, as a trans disabled welsh person, am ever going to experience an irl society free of ableism, transphobia, or discrimination against minority cultures within my lifetime. so why would the internet be any different? i don't want to sound defeatist but to be honest sometimes i feel really defeated about these things and i don't know what to do. there will always be horrible people, even horrible people who call themselves leftists, so what can we do?

i suppose if cohost had had a larger staff/moderation team then it would'vr been easier to combat bigots, but i don't think they ever got near enough money to hire a bigger team. volunteer moderators perhaps?? i think there would have been a lot of people happy to help volunteer to work on some aspect of cohost, since so many people here seem to be into web/tech stuff and also have a big interest in this site thriving.

i don't really understand anything about running social media though.

weird to see people migrating their stuff to tumblr/twitter/mastodon when i deleted my accounts on those platforms bc i found them unbearable to post here instead.

very angry and upset at the state of the internet that we are all pushed towards bigger social media, in particular twitter/instagram/facebook, and that smaller social media like cohost struggle to survive, and in cases like cohost they can no longer survive.

i hope the combing tags thing will make it easier to filter/block tags now. because my blocked tags is filled with variations on each tag like this (use "tag" as a replacement for like any trigger/trauma/etc thing that could be filtered):

• tag
• cw tag
• tw tag
• cw: tag
• tw: tag
• tag cw
• tag tw
• tag mention
• tag posting
• tagposting
• (abbreviation i've never heard of for tag and would never have thought to block unless i'd gotten exposed to the triggering content to begin with)
• tag kink
• tag fetish
• trans tag
• (doesn't contain the word i have filtered but still relates to the trigger/trauma. they just never bothered to also use the wider/umbrella term as a tag)

(seriously.. there are so many traumatic things i've seen bc people tag it with just a trans/kink-specific variant or like a sub-category, and don't tag it with the umbrella term itself. how am i supposed to filter that??)

and things still slip through bc people use so many variations and can't seem to just tag something plainly with just "tag".