Thomas ReedNov 20, 2022
If you’re new to Mastodon, you may at some point find that you’re being pressured to put your posts behind a content warning (CW). Although CWs make sense for things like images of violence or nudity, some people are bullying others to put CWs on discussions of politics, racism, etc.
Please know that you should not feel pressured to obey these individuals. They do not speak for all. If someone does not want to be exposed to these topics, Mastodon gives them all the tools they need to avoid them, such as keyword filters and the ability to block or mute people who are posting things they don’t like.
Show threadelf™Nov 20, 2022

@thomasareed Someone said we 'need to post CWs on food posts'

I said to myself what in the fuck is that all about? It made little to no sense, period.

Show threadThomas ReedNov 20, 2022
@elf Apparently someone got upset about a photo of a turkey posted by @k8em0. That’s pretty ridiculous, IMO, especially at this time of year. People like talking about and posting pictures of food, and that’s not exactly a controversial subject.
Show threadJacob WhiteNov 21, 2022

@thomasareed @elf @k8em0 Seeing images of food out of the blue is a common trigger of traumatic episodes or relapses for people recovering from eating disorders. I've never entirely understood it, because it's kind of unavoidable in general. But, if in hyper-specific communities or if out of consideration for specific people you know, it *might* make sense. In general? kind of ridiculous to expect everyone to do.

It's definitely one of the more controversial CWs, one with lots of valid arguments against it for psychological reasons too.

Show threadelf™Nov 21, 2022
@enigcryptist @thomasareed @k8em0 If folks are that hair-triggered then its probably best to use a number of filters to save themselves a lot of grief. If they dont IMO they are just wanting to cause a scene. I get that folks have issues; but doing nada to prevent having them triggered is not very wise, is it?
Show threadJacob WhiteNov 21, 2022

@elf I kinda agree. But understandably, images are hard for people to filter for though without keywords, no matter how good Mastodon's filtering is. IMO, CWs are courtesy for if and when reasonable filters like that fail (e.g. not everyone sends food pics with the words "Thanksgiving food" or "turkey" or ...).

This is one of many examples where CWs lead to headache-inducing discourse (which I'm contributing to here, admittedly). IMO it's best to just draw the line somewhere, and be open + compassionate to at least considering otherwise if people give convincing reasons to do more. Is it worth the effort? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Show threadelf™
@enigcryptist maybe we can bug the powers that be for a premade set of filter CWs that lets a poster tick off a box: food, politics, sexual content etc so its very easy to CW an image
Nov 21, 2022 at 2:56amWeb
Show threadJacob WhiteNov 21, 2022
@elf Yeah i dunno. What I do like with some implementations of CW (e.g. Tumblr, which is a hack over tagging) is that the tag filters will flag content if anyone in the reblog/reply chain (path in engagement graph? idk what you'd call it) tags the CW appropriately. Dunno if that's possible in Fediverse though because that's lots of cross-server interactions to trawl, but auto-expand if not flagged by filter like that would be cool.