I think I've been able to put more of a pin in why the CW-heavy culture of Mastodon is hard for me to fully adapt to. It's really unintuitive to me what needs it and the general guidelines I've been given haven't helped narrow it down much.
Right off the bat I wanna be clear that I have no problems with content warnings or anything like that.
There is certain stuff that I get why folks would want content warnings. Despite my post the other day, I do get why folks would want kinks and nsfw stuff to have warnings in general. I get why clearly traumatic/traumatizing stuff should have them. I get why folks would want things like political news to have content warnings. Those are all clear to me and fine.
Some of the more "notorious" Mastodon content warnings like food or eye contact were strange at first blush to me, but now I get why some food would want them regardless of my personal thoughts on how much of a "default" cw they should be. My problem with this category of CWs is that I don't have an intuitive sense of what falls into it.
Like, there are some hypothetical content warning requests that seem clearly unreasonable to expect as a default. If someone tried to push, say, pictures of buses as something that needed a warning then I suspect most people would find that unreasonable. But what about non-kinky pictures with bare feet in them? Or pictures taken from high altitudes? Pictures where someone is wearing leather? I can picture someone objecting to each of them with somewhat reasonable sounding objections, but they all feel borderline and I don't have an intuitive sense of how reasonable or unreasonable those objections would be taken as.
One solution to this problem is, of course, just post and figure it out as you go along. And there's some merit to that solution. But it would mean that any time I post something that has some borderline element to it I would feel nervous that I'm doing something wrong and I don't want social media to feel like I'm walking through a field that may or may not have landmines in it.
