Users Are Too Dependent on Centralized Techno-Fascist Corporate Structure to Ever Leave Discord

I’m watching people scatter into countless real-time chat alternatives to Discord after Discord started pulling the age-verification and age-gating card.

https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/09/discord-to-roll-out-age-verification-next-month-for-full-access-to-its-platform/

It’s very frustrating because people are entirely missing the point of a community and how social networks work. Real-time platforms and social media networks only work well when a large number of people share the same space at the same time. If everyone creates separate servers or competing apps, the result is fragmentation that makes it unviable.

One reason why Bluesky became so successful is the invitation and starter-pack move. It essentially allowed people to move collectively as cliques. Bluesky used invitations and starter packs to move groups of friends together. This kept communities intact. Moving as cliques preserves network structure, whereas random scattering does not. People aren’t do not seem to intend to move as cliques or subgraphs of networks off of Discord. And the whole reason people were on Discord was to host their communities, so an alternative becomes pointless if your community doesn’t remain intact.

Instead of an active, strongly connected, possibly distributed network, you get dozens of small pockets. I am referring to a potential distributed network rather than a single centralized platform, because Matrix is an example of a decentralized chat protocol. Not all alternatives have to be centralized like Discord. Technically, many older chat protocols, such as XMPP and IRC, are examples of federated real-time synchronous messaging. They allowed communication between users on different, independently operated servers. Federation means that multiple servers can interconnect so that users from separate networks can exchange messages with one another seamlessly.

Decentralized alternatives would not be a problem if people moved to the same distributed network as cohesive groups. However, what I am seeing is that people move in disconnected and stochastic ways to entirely separate distributed networks, so communities are not kept intact. For example, when people move to XMPP servers or Matrix servers, it bifurcates and disconnects social networks. Notice I said XMPP or Matrix, which logically means people are on Matrix but not XMPP, or they are on XMPP but not Matrix. That implies a person would need to be on both Matrix and XMPP to speak to their original community from Discord if it split down the middle. To synchronize conversations in chats, there would need to be a bridge. It’s a pretty complicated solution.

The likely outcome is that people will remain on the dominant platform because of its scale and structure. The deeper irony is that while people may want independence from corporate platforms, they often struggle to organize effectively without the centralized structure those platforms provide. They’ve become so dependent on corporate structures to support their communities that they have no clue how to organize their own social networks in a sustainable way.

I’ve always been an internet nerd, but most of my social life has been offline. I view my interactions with the social app layer of the internet as a game, so losing that domain of the Internet is not devastating to me.

I’ll give you an example. This is a WordPress site. You hear this insincere nostalgia from Millennials and Gen X for a simulacrum that never was, especially concerning forums. Check this out: when you go into the plugin installation section of WordPress, this is on the second row you see:

https://bbpress.org/

That means any WordPress site has the capability to host a forum. They’re nostalgic for a setup where you can use a simple install script on any hosting service to install WordPress. After that, you can then just add a plugin to turn it into a forum. Hell, they can do this on WordPress.com if they don’t want to self-host.

You can make a forum, but no one will use it because they’d rather use a centralized platform like Reddit. Users have become so dependent on corporations to structure and organize communities that they can’t do it themselves. It’s sort of like the cognitive debt that accrues when people outsource their thinking to AI.

The issue is not that forums are hard to host or create; rather, the issue is that people have become so dependent on centralized corporate structures that they can’t maintain or organize their own communities, which is why everyone ends up on Reddit or Discord. A reason I keep hearing for why people don’t want to leave Discord is that it’s hard to recreate the community structure that Discord’s features provide. They claim that they want independence from corporate platforms, but rely on the centralized structure those platforms provide to function socially.

People say they want decentralized freedom, but in practice they depend on centralized platforms to maintain social cohesion. Stochastically scattering to the digital winds of the noosphere destroys the very communities they’re trying to preserve.

Parasocial Relationships Be Wild

All I’ve got to say is social media is fucking wild! People won’t know you. They won’t bother to look through your blog or any other posts you’ve made. They run into one post of yours, dislike it, and create an entire motherfucking fictional story about you where you are the worst example of everything you’re politically opposed to. They spread that story and get everyone who follows them involved in the parasocial delusion.

The insane thing is that they’re interacting with whoever they’ve created a fiction about as a representation and symbol of that character. Basically, they’re using the person as a prop and not even actually engaging with the person. Instead of engaging with a human being, they engage with a a caricature that represents everything they politically oppose. People spend hours and hours doomscrolling doing this. It’s fucking nuts!

I truly am starting to think that how much people hate Bluesky on the fediverse is a weird version of European nationalism. Don’t get me wrong—as a Black person living in America, I can tell you there are tons of reasons to hate America. However, it seems like Mastodon—which is largely culturally European—has reflexively reacted to Bluesky as an American tech corporation. It has become a stand-in for an American thing they hate. I’ve been off and on the fediverse since 2022. The sheer amount of genuine hatred aimed at Americans on American tech platforms has never been this bad.

Bluesky is seen as a U.S.-based tech company. Fediverse culture is often perceived as more European and anti-corporate. Since Bluesky becomes a stand-in for “American tech imperialism,” it becomes a way to criticize America. I’m starting to believe the intense hostility toward Bluesky users is a symptom of reactionary politics.

The problem with reactionary politics is that people tend to feel justified in it, so they don’t examine it. Authoritarianism and fascism are not pluralistic. It’s the idea that this culture is good and that culture is bad. When you start prioritizing one culture over another for nationalistic concerns, you are reacting to nationalism by being nationalistic.

No, I am not saying tolerate Nazis. I am saying that treating everyone in a country as a Nazi is nationalistic. If you live in America, you have to use American things, especially with this tariff nonsense. It’s not something you can boycott. If you work in America, the corporation way up the chain probably uses Microsoft products. I live in an apartment complex owned by an American corporation. It just feels like what’s powering—honestly bordering on—the hateful culture on this platform is nationalism. The hatred on here seems to be part of a larger social shift. A lot of Europeans on here don’t want to be technologically associated with America. That’s fine. However, it seems like the value judgments are manifesting as nasty, covert authoritarianism and anti-Blackness. It’s killing this space, people.

America is on fire because of runaway reactionary politics and populism. Reactionary accelerationism is why America is on fire. If Europeans react to American nationalism with nationalistic imperatives, you’re literally becoming that which you believe is immoral.

Collectively blaming or treating “Americans” or American consumers as fascist or inherently bad mirrors the logic of ethnonationalism. It is really weird, because the label is not attached to all Americans; rather, it seems attached to American consumers. As an American, I do not care; rather, I am simply pointing out that being ethnonationalists as a reaction to ethnonationalism is inherently a corrupt and losing position. It’s also anti-democratic. It’s just insane to me how easily digital spaces slip into authoritarianism disguised as moderation. Every surveillance state uses the excuse of keeping people safe and protecting them from bad actors as a Trojan horse.

Again, assuming American tech users or entities are complicit in fascism by default utilizes the same logic as ethnonationalism. As an American, I don’t care. I do care about the rest of the world slipping into nationalism, though. So, please don’t.

No love is lost between me and this country. I get the hate for America, I really do, which is why it would be a shame to be just like America.

It’s wild. To be clear, as a Black person living in America in the year 2026, I am used to people creating fictional representations of me as a means to discriminate against me. My feelings aren’t hurt. It is just insane to me that it is happening on the fediverse.

Let’s be clear, though: Reactionary politics was the death of Twitter. Don’t be like Twitter.

When you are on your travels in the virtual online world of the internet, please may I request you refrain from fraternizing with any trolls that may come your way.

#Online #SocialMedia #Internet #Parasocial #Relationships

#Image attribution: Erik Werenskiold, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Page URL: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fylgisveinn.jpg.

So, I had an experience with an influencer account on the fediverse: @FediTips

People believe they are being informed when they are being influenced. That account is litterally publishing what are technically definitionally manifestos.

That emphasized why I don’t argue online. There is an interesting property about facts: factual ontological propositions about something will converge. That is a fancy way of saying that if something is factual, it would be corroborated. Accuracy is not the only important thing; precision is, too. The more corroborative aspects that converge on that claim, the more precise it is. That is why in science, replication and a lot of measurements are so important.

When we talk about online conversations, this is important because if I say something is a fact, and there is a source I got it from, I should cite where I got it. If I or other sources are citing that or a different source saying something, it at least makes the statement more precise, albeit not necessarily more accurate. Accuracy means is a close, approximate representation whereas precision is something is consistent. If you hit the bulls eye once but never again, that is accurate but imprecise. If you never hit the bulls eye but always hit the same spot, that is precise. You can be inaccurate yet precise.

That means if something makes a claim, a source exists, and you can check that claim by visiting the source. If there are multiple sources making the same claim, it is a precise claim.The issue I have with arguments online, for example, endless arguments on Mastodon about Bluesky, is that the sources backing whatever facts I would present are accessible. So, if someone makes a statement about the AT protocol and you say that is wrong, you can look at the documentation, point this out, and say it is wrong because x, y, and z.

That brings me to the fuckery of today:

@FediTips said to me today:

No, you cannot run your own server on AT. Bluesky have made it virtually impossible to set up independent infrastructure. You can store data, but the connections to others run through Bluesky corporation’s infrastructure which they control.

I shit on Bluesky all day, every day, so I’m not a Bluesky stan. But all you have to do is think about why this doesn’t make sense. They are essentially saying that you cannot have a server running a Bluesky PDS that isn’t owned by Bluesky. One, that is not how servers work. A protocol is a way for devices to talk to one another and network.

A network protocol is a formal specification that defines how systems interoperate. It establishes message schemas, authentication mechanisms, transport methods, state transitions, and other rules governing communication between nodes. If multiple servers implement the same protocol specification correctly, they can exchange data and participate in the same network. At the protocol layer, interoperability is determined by adherence to the specification, not by who owns or operates a given server.

Protocol compliance does not inherently guarantee open or permissionless participation. In the architecture of protocols, operators impose constraints through licensing terms, cryptographic trust roots, certificate authorities, service discovery mechanisms, federation allowlists, or other gatekeeping controls. Protocols enable independent servers to communicate; however, it does not logically follow that any compliant server must be accepted into the broader network without additional policy or governance constraints. This is the point they are making.

However, they are conflating who owns the server with what can be allowed in the network. But what they argue for the AT protocol always applies to the ActivityPub protocol. They specifically said, “No, you cannot run your own server on AT. Bluesky has made it virtually impossible to set up independent infrastructure.”

No, you can absolutely run your own independent server that communicates over the AT protocol. Either they understand this and are arguing in bad faith, which I think is very likely, or they are completely disinterested in facts. They merely want to spread and enforce a cultural and political norm. Maybe it’s both.

For example, I am using the ActivityPub protocol to post this, and it is sent to your folks’ inboxes via ActivityStreams through the WordPress ActivityPub plugin. Anyone can set up their own servers on their own hosts. I know for a fact that some feeds are being run off Raspberry Pis in people’s closets. In fact, some people have both fediverse instances and AT protocol PDSs running off the same Raspberry Pis in their closets. By this person’s reasoning, that would imply that Bluesky owns their ISPs, the closets, and the Raspberry Pis.

Yes, the practical network experience heavily depends on Bluesky-operated infrastructure. And yes, it is true that this is different from something like Mastodon on ActivityPub, where federation between independently operated servers is widely distributed and actually decentralized. I’m not contesting that the infrastructure is heavily dependent on and operated by Bluesky.

That’s not the claim @FediTips made. The claim they made is that everyone else’s computers—a cloud is just someone else’s computer, mind you—that use the AT protocol are owned by Bluesky. This statement is so absurd to me that I am not sure if this was a semantic error and not what they meant, or if it is exactly what they meant. If it is the former, it is still bad, because they were disinterested in fact-checking, which is my point. If they bothered to fact-check, they would have caught the inaccuracy or the semantic error.

Secondly, let’s say you know nothing at all about servers, protocols, etc.—you can just look it up.

https://atproto.com/guides/self-hosting

https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/marketplace/catalog/bluesky-social-pds

I was not aware that DigitalOcean was owned by Bluesky. That’s because they are not owned by Bluesky. DigitalOcean is to an AT protocol PDS what a Mastodon host is to Mastodon. If this person had simply done a five-minute search, they would realize that Bluesky does not own the independent servers for the Bluesky apps, albeit it controls the protocol architecture. Personally, I think @FediTips did it in bad faith, because multiple developers have corrected these Mastodon influencer accounts over and over again. At this point, it is propaganda.

I don’t care about this argument in particular. Rather, it’s an example of why I don’t argue with people online. They don’t check what they say or look up what the other person said because they are disinterested in facts. They are interested in the normative claim and cultural norms they are trying to spread and enforce. It’s basically a form of evangelizing and proselytizing.

Again, I don’t really care for this particular argument, which is why I never directly addressed it with them. What I am saying is that they were disinterested in easily accessible facts, so arguing with them to persuade them is a waste of my time.

People on social media care about culture first and facts second. I am not going after the people on Mastodon specifically. Redditors are infamous for this shit. If you ask me, Reddit and Discord are ground zero cases for this dumbass culture of reply guys.

I wrote my own Bayesian classifier and Markov algorithm a long time ago that curate only what I want to see in activity streams, so I don’t see whatever fuckery many of these idiots on social media are doing. I have my own Bayesian and Markov curation algorithm for activity streams and my own algorithm for feeds on Bluesky.

You can see the documentation for how Activity Streams, which is what ActivityPub uses, works here:

Activity Streams 2.0

https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-core

I curate the ActivityStream of my inbox points to see posts based on relevance rather than chronological order. Most of the time, their nonsense is filtered out. I just had time to kill.

Your BlueSky Feed Is Porn You Didn’t Ask For Because Your Friends Are Gooners With a Severe Porn Addiction

A common complaint I see people make on Bluesky is: why am I being served so much porn or things I am not interested in? They will incorrectly believe that the algorithm is broken. It’s not broken. You didn’t know the people you knew as well as you thought you did. Porn addiction is a thing, and porn addiction is especially common with weebs. You’re seeing deranged shit because people you follow have porn addictions and are into deranged shit. So, though you may not be consuming porn, people in your network are. That activity kicks into your feeds.

The issue I have with that is that it essentially normalizes being sex pests in a space on the Internet. That sets the expectation that it is good—attractive, even—to act like that elsewhere. That expectation alienates relationships. Bluesky creates a cultural space that offers an unrealistic, bizarre representation of social relationships, which isolates and alienates the users who stay on there consuming erotica and porn like they do.

So, user repos in Bluesky have a property for likes. Bluesky’s underlying AT Protocol stores likes as first-class structured records in each user’s AT Protocol repository. In the AT Protocol lexicon, a like is an app.bsky.feed.like record type. Unlike a simple boolean flag on a post, it is its own record with a creation timestamp and a subject field that holds a strong reference to the liked record.

That strong reference is composed of an AT-URI and a CID. The AT-URI identifies the exact record in the network by DID, collection, and record key. The CID is a cryptographic content identifier that uniquely identifies the exact content of that liked record.

These like records exist under the app.bsky.feed.like namespace in the user’s repo. Bluesky’s repo model is built so that these repos are hosted on a user’s Personal Data Server and are publicly readable through the AT Protocol APIs. Because of that, the like record and its fields can be fetched, indexed, and used by any client or service that can query the protocol.

The protocol exposes operations like getLikes. This returns all of the like records tied to a particular subject’s AT-URI and CID. It also exposes getActorLikes. This returns all of the subject references a given actor has liked. Those API calls return structured like objects with timestamps and subject references directly from the public repository data.

Various feeds hosted by different PDSs use the likes property to construct the feeds that you see. Since the likes of people you follow are included in your social graph, along with your own likes, you’re going to get served the porn they are consuming. Because likes are public and anyone can write an algorithm to see everyone’s likes, you can clearly see just how much porn people are consuming.

Honestly, what started to turn my stomach about the people on Bluesky is how they behave across different contexts. If you look through the records of the posts they interact with, you’ll see them engaging with political posts in the replies like a normal person. Then, when you look through their AT Protocol records, you see hours and hours of them interacting with every kind of porn imaginable. I am not exaggerating. Hours of likes for porn posts within 1–10 minutes of each other. Am I sex-negative? A prude? No, this site is filled with furry, gay bara porn, lol. You can have a drink without being an alcoholic. The problem with these people is like people who can’t have one drink without drinking the whole fucking day; they can’t consume porn in healthy ways.

I think people assume that their feed is customized for them and based on their likes. No—feeds are generalized based on what everyone likes and then served to your subgraph. It’s not just about who you follow; it’s about who they follow. So if you follow someone who follows a lot of people with porn addictions, you will see porn. Bluesky isn’t weighting the algorithm to do this. Basically, it’s the people in your social network with furry, hentai, or trans porn addictions who are driving it.

BlueSky’s Solution To Moderating Is Moderating Without Moderating via Social Proximity

I have noticed a lot of people are confused about why some posts don’t show up on threads, though they are not labeled by the moderation layer. Bluesky has begun using what it calls social neighborhoods (or network proximity) as a ranking signal for replies in threads. Replies from people who are closer to you in the social graph, accounts you follow, interact with, or share mutual connections with, are prioritized and shown more prominently. Replies from accounts that are farther away in that network are down-ranked. They are pushed far down the thread or placed behind “hidden replies.”

Each person gets their own unique view of a thread based on their social graph. It creates the impression that replies from distant users simply don’t exist. This is true even though they’re still technically public and viewable if you expand the thread or adjust filters. Bluesky is explicitly using features of subgraphs to moderate without moderating. Their reasoning is that if you can’t see each other, you can’t harass each other. Ergo, there is nothing to moderate.

Bluesky mentions that here:

https://bsky.social/about/blog/10-31-2025-building-healthier-social-media-update

As a digression, I’m not going to lie: I really enjoyed working on software built on the AT protocol, but their fucking users are so goddamn weird. It’s sort of like enjoying building houses, but hating every single person who moves into them. But, you don’t have to deal with them because you’re just the contractor. That is how I feel about Bluesky. I hate the people. I really like the protocol and infrastructure.

I sort of am a sadist who does enjoy drama, so I do get schadenfreude from people with social media addictions and parasocial fixations who reply to random people on Bluesky, because they don’t realize their replies are disconnected from the author’s thread unless that person is within their network. They aren’t part of the conversation they think they are. They’re algorithmically isolated from everyone else. Their replies aren’t viewable from the author’s thread because of how Bluesky handles social neighborhoods.

Bluesky’s idea of social neighborhoods is about grouping users into overlapping clusters based on real interaction patterns rather than just the follow graph. Unlike Twitter, it does not treat the network as one big public square. Instead, it models networks of “social neighborhoods” made up of people you follow, people who follow you, people you frequently interact with, and people who are closely connected to those groups. They’re soft, probabilistic groupings rather than strict labels.

Everyone does not see the same replies. Bluesky is being a bit vague with “hidden.” Hidden means your reply is still anchored to the thread and can be expanded. There is another way Bluesky can handle this. Bluesky uses social neighborhoods to judge contextual relevance. Replies from people inside or near your social neighborhood are more likely to be shown inline with a thread, expanded by default, or served in feeds. Replies from outside your neighborhood are still public and still indexed, but they’re treated as lower-context contributions.

Basically, if you reply to a thread, you will see it anchored to the conversation, and everyone will see it in search results, as a hashtag, or from your profile, but it will not be accessible via the thread of the person you were replying to. It is like shadow-banning people from threads unless they are strongly networked.

Because people have not been working with the AT Protocol like I have, they assume they are shadow-banned across the entire Bluesky app view. No—everyone is automatically shadow-banned from everyone else unless they are within the same social neighborhood. In other words, you are not part of the conversation you think you are joining because you are not part of their social group.

Your replies will appear in profiles, hashtag feeds, or search results without being visually anchored to the full thread. Discovery impressions are neighborhood-agnostic: they serve content because it matches a query, tag, or activity stream. Once the reply is shown, the app then decides whether it’s worth pulling in the rest of the conversation for you. If the original author and most participants fall outside your neighborhood, Bluesky often chooses not to expand that context automatically.

Bluesky really is trying to avoid having to moderate, so this is their solution. Instead of banning or issuing takedown labels to DIDs, the system lets replies exist everywhere, but not in that particular instance of the thread.

I find this ironic because a large reason why many people are staying on Bluesky and not moving to the fediverse—thank God, because I do not want them there—is discoverability, virality, and engagement.

In case anyone is asking how I know so much about how these algorithms work: I was a consultant on a lot of these types of algorithms, so I certainly hope I’d know how they work, lol. No, you get no more details about the work I’ve done. I have no hand in the algorithm Bluesky is using, but I have proposed and implemented that type of algorithm before.

I have an interest in noetics and the noosphere. A large amount of my ontological work is an extension of my attempts to model domains that have no spatial or temporal coordinates. The question is how do you generalize a metric space that has no physically, spatial properties. I went to school to try to formalize those ideas. Turns out they’re rather useful for digital social networks, too. The ontological analog to spatial distance, when you have no space, is a graph of similarities.

This can be modeled by representing each item as a node in a weighted graph, where edges are weighted by dissimilarity rather than similarity. Highly similar items are connected by low-weight edges, while less similar items are connected by higher-weight edges. Distances in the graph, computed using standard shortest-path algorithms, then correspond to degrees of similarity. Closely related items are separated by short path lengths, while increasingly dissimilar items require longer paths through the graph. It turns out that attempts to generalize metric spaces for noetic domains—to model noetic/psychic spaces—are actually pretty useful for social media algorithms, lol.

The Virulent Infection of BlueSky by Extremely Online, Brain-Rotten Zombies from X Continues

So, it appears a new migration from Twitter to Bluesky is underway. It appears to be some of the most virulent former 4chan users possible. Yep, I got off Bluesky just in time, lol. I’ve been keeping tabs on a particularly virulent and toxic subgraph on Twitter for years. It pretty much stayed off Bluesky because they couldn’t act like abusive dumpster fires there. Welp, looks like they’re becoming more active on Bluesky. It’s not looking good over there.

That they are on the move says something. It’s sort of like how the US is suddenly a place that is hospitable to measles. It was all but eradicated here.

My husband likes to say that you can tell where not to be by where I am looking from somewhere else. I like fires. So if I am observing your platform or community from a distance, you probably don’t want to be there.

Edit:

I had originally posted the above on a now-defunct federated blog. It got blasted to Mastodon. Someone replied and asked what I think is causing this. I debated actually answering, then decided that I’ve had enough of the dumpster fire that is social media. I decided not to wade through social media tech discourse into what will mostly likely be an Internet argument with a complete stranger. I am a techie dragon, and I engage with things to learn how they work so I can tinker with them. I only engaged with tech discourse to get my hands on how the tech works. There’s nothing in it for me to be part of larger conversations. Arguing with random strangers on social media is not an epistemically useful format. I do think I should answer, though. Just on my blog.

I treat social media like I do an addictive substance. I do not believe in abstinence, but I do believe in harm-reduction paradigms, so when I see everyone overdosing on social media, I pull back and shut down a lot of accounts. The Fediverse instance where the first part of this blog post was posted has been taken down, moved to this blog, and this section appended to it.

I often use the word weeb pejoratively. Here, I am using it categorically. There really isn’t an “official” name outside of otaku or weeb culture. I am at the fringes and intersections of it as a furry. My husband is a millennial weeb. With that being said—

The migration is in large part because Bluesky is capturing the otaku/weeb niche of X. X hosted networks that were ecosystems of “anime fans.” These included anime and manga artists, doujin and hentai artists, VTuber fans, NSFW illustrators, fandom shitposters, niche fetish communities, and other chronically and extremely online content creators and influencers. That culture relied heavily on timelines, informal networks, and discovery through reposts, replies, and algorithmic amplification.

Elon Musk pretty much destabilized X’s ecosystems and social networks from multiple directions at once. Algorithm changes made reach inconsistent. Moderation created anxiety and uncertainty about what would get suppressed or unintentionally “viral”. Bots, engagement farming, and blue-check reply spam actively poisoned fandom conversations.

Bluesky is the memetic and cultural progeny of early imageboard cultures. I conducted a phylogenetic analysis of the memetics, which you can check out here:

Bluesky is a competitor of X for otaku and fandom communities. Bluesky has a lot of the aspects of old Twitter dynamics around which fandom culture evolved. Recently, Bluesky introduced something big in those communities: going live. Since X is no longer habitable for weebs, they are moving to Bluesky.

For example, the AT protocol already has PinkSea:

https://pinksea.art

And, of course, there is WAFRN:

https://app.wafrn.net

I cope and deal with issues via personal, private sublimation and not so much exhibitionism of my art or consumption of art. So, while I do make comic books and do a shit ton of weeby art, it’s for the purpose of sublimation, so I’m not too interested in being a part of a community. That’s a large reason I am not active in those spaces. I’m quite cynical, in general, so I am suspicious of any community — and I mean any community, at all. Honestly, I am mildly contemptuous of mass participation or any sense of belonging. So, my art stays private, because it is created for me – and just me.