Mastodawn

Elizabeth Tai | 戴秀铃 🇲🇾

A lion's share of the people @kissane surveyed responded that they left #Mastodon because they got yelled at, scolded and lectured when they were here. One major source for this appears to be unrealistic expectations for the use of content warnings.
I have been lectured for CWs & for posts that contradicts an "accepted" narrative. I feel surprisingly horrid after each lecture 😅
I like its decentralised nature, but it can get toxic here.

#SocialMedia #GoodRead

https://erinkissane.com/mastodon-is-easy-and-fun-except-when-it-isnt

verifiedpansexual

@liztai @kissane depends on the server you join and what are the rules. Try to stay family-friendly, it will help a lot

Made in DNA Jul 30, 2023

@Coffee_cmd @liztai @kissane
But see, there you go. WHY should I have to be "family-friendly". I'm a family man but I don't feel the need to be "family-friendly". What does that even MEAN? Puritanical mores? No thanks.

Elizabeth Tai | 戴秀铃 🇲🇾Jul 30, 2023

@DNA @Coffee_cmd @kissane I am not sure where this instance specific idea comes from, but most of the people who are rude and condescending did not come from hachyderm.io but other servers.

Made in DNA Jul 30, 2023

@liztai @Coffee_cmd @kissane
Oh yeah, they were from all over, but I don't recall where from and I'm not calling out ANY instance. I'm calling out the moral police.

Elizabeth Tai | 戴秀铃 🇲🇾Jul 30, 2023

@DNA @Coffee_cmd @kissane and they don't follow me too, which means they were hunting for posts via hashtags, which makes me wonder that's what they do - look for posts that are out of line and call them out.

Made in DNA Jul 30, 2023

@liztai @Coffee_cmd @kissane
Preach on, I am here for your sermon. I swear.

Elizabeth Tai | 戴秀铃 🇲🇾Jul 30, 2023

@DNA @Coffee_cmd @kissane haha thanks. But I wish I can autblock these people though. They are so annoying.

Made in DNA Jul 30, 2023

@liztai @Coffee_cmd @kissane
Make a game of it. THANK them for calling themselves out to you so you can preemptively block them. LOL.

Elizabeth Tai | 戴秀铃 🇲🇾Jul 30, 2023

@DNA @Coffee_cmd @kissane and what does family friend exactly mean? Many interpretations and we can't all live up to it.

Made in DNA Jul 30, 2023

@liztai @Coffee_cmd @kissane
Amen (if you'll forgive the pun).

Made in DNA Jul 30, 2023

@liztai @kissane

And @Coffee_cmd, if it sounds like I'm calling you in particular out, NO, I am not and I apologize. I say it again, I APOLOGIZE. I don't know you, and I am not going to judge you. But the "family-friendly" sentiment phrasing has become like a dog-whistle to me. I NEVER go out of my way to be rude to people, but I don't feel the need to kneel before the alter of "morals" either.

Made in DNA Jul 30, 2023

@liztai @kissane
Read this. At first, I was a bit cowed, then I told people to fuck off because they knew where the mute button was. Things changed pretty quickly. And it was nice again.

Elizabeth Tai | 戴秀铃 🇲🇾Jul 30, 2023

@DNA @kissane yea I did that when I got a rude message about CW-ing posts about food. I am tired of being nice.

ErosBlog Bacchus has moved!Jul 30, 2023

@liztai @kissane Somehow as a Mastodon newbie I managed to internalize the local ethos of "content warnings really are important" while never wavering an inch on the necessary truculent correlate "nobody but me gets to decide when a CW is needed or how it should be written, and if they don't like it, I got a free block for them right damn here".

Elizabeth Tai | 戴秀铃 🇲🇾Jul 30, 2023

@ErosBlog @kissane I do CW but some insist on gating perfectly reasonable posts, and that is very irritating. I won't go beyond what is necessary - ie spoilers, political stuff, death and violence.

ErosBlog Bacchus has moved!Jul 30, 2023

@liztai @kissane My heaviest use of CW is for my adult stuff, necessarily. However I am quite crosswise with CWs for politics, because everything is politics if you stare at it hard enough. So I limit my politics CWs to my deliberate shitposts and anything that is controversial among decent people as I understand them.

allrite Jul 30, 2023

@liztai I remember that it was in relation to food and you are a Malaysian. But then I think back to our lockdown in Sydney and how we live in a very white area with only a single Asian grocery for over 230,000 people. And I think of how hard it was to get a decent Malaysian meal when we'd run out of ingredients and...

Oh, just keep posting it. We ain't in lockdown anymore and my hunger is my problem! 😁

Elizabeth Tai | 戴秀铃 🇲🇾Jul 30, 2023

@allrite thanks! What many don't realise is that food is very central to South East Asian cultures too. Telling us to gate those content is akin to saying that what matters to us is offensive to you, which brings up a whole lot of resentment.

jeSuisatire neindochohh ᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷ Jul 30, 2023

> but it can get toxic here.

surprise, after all it's the internet! ..

btw
I only experienced discussion and mention of CW in english languageand on mastodon.

This is an international fediVerse how do we put that into context?

Elizabeth Tai | 戴秀铃 🇲🇾Jul 30, 2023

@jesuisatire @kissane I have no idea lol. Are you saying that internationals are not as concerned about CW posts? I am ok with that personally. I don't think we should impose CW on anyone.

jeSuisatire neindochohh ᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷ Jul 30, 2023

I guess I'm trying to say that this is a problem of the US and/or anglosaxons and their of spring and their for actually has nothing to do with mastodon and much less with the fediVerse.

Actually actually, to be more precise, it's reasonable to consider that refugees from "toxic twitter" from the past have become confronted with new first class twitter refugees that want their twitter back, a place the others tried to left behind.

Different communities.

growing pains ..

@kissane

Elizabeth Tai | 戴秀铃 🇲🇾Jul 30, 2023

@jesuisatire @kissane you mean importing US cultural values to Mastodon?

jeSuisatire neindochohh ᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷ Jul 30, 2023

That's definitely an issue of this wave into the fediverse.

The twitter outrage is a english and mainly US thing.

Spanish twitter doesn't care.
German twitter not to much and germans aren't into fb/tw and aware of the big brother problem from a different angle.

Also, this is and was build by the coding community.
They developed this and adapted their stream to the tools like filters.
Coders pee themselves over any kind of "[" to many as it breaks the code.

Elizabeth Tai | 戴秀铃 🇲🇾Jul 30, 2023

@jesuisatire @kissane Yea I feel this too. The Twitter and Elon is a Nazi discourse doesn't really happen in Malaysian circles either. It's amusing to read at first but after a while it gets really tiring 😅at times I do feel like retreating into typing stuff in bahasa Malaysia just to keep a separation but there are hardly any Malaysians here so...

jeSuisatire neindochohh ᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷ Jul 30, 2023

> but there are hardly any Malaysians here so...

Everyone is just "using" the internet because "it's for free".
That includes politicians who actually should protect their citizens from exploitation of their data and privacy by totalitarian monopoly, even worth, from another country.

They are all dancing while the band is playing on the titanic and Musk (who is neoliberal fascist scum) just took over the wheel of one ship playing iceberg search.

jeSuisatire neindochohh ᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷ Jul 30, 2023

And also it became a save space for all the people that fled toxic twitter and for example stupid politics war. That's why lot's of LGBTQ people complained, and people from the spectrum (coding community), for example about "eye contact", or visualy disabled trying to maintain the alttext best practice established.

Like a little garden with well reasoned particular rules for marginal groups that gets invaded by a hoard of woodstockers.

jeSuisatire neindochohh ᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷ Jul 30, 2023

Don't get me wrong.
We want "you" here and we created this because it's the only possible setup for a diverse internet with freedom of speech and a chance for democracy. There is no other option, by design, for a multicultural world.
and btw
that means the only path to escape the rule of US hegemony (or any other) of the internet.
In other words:
All odds and existing winning power structures and interests are against us.

(and actually the X refugees don't care about that)

jeSuisatire neindochohh ᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷ Jul 30, 2023

> internationals are not as concerned about CW posts?

International as in "spanisch language mastodon", "german language mastodon" are not.
English is "the" international language. Not using hashtags or specifying the country, especially in english or spanish is very annoying.
People from Spain do that, and people from the US.
Latinos normally mention the country the issue is about, even people from the UK but US is like "every De Santis fart is an international problem"!
🤣
@kissane

jeSuisatire neindochohh ᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷ Jul 30, 2023

> I don't think we should impose CW on anyone.

I consider the term CW as in Warning an error.
Content Wrapper or subject line solves that issue.

Actually most of content warning has to be resolved by filters, that's on the user side or even instances can/should do that.

CW -> NSFW in any case and that means brutality or sexually explicit.

A content wrapper is pleasant because it safes my time by summing up.

A "warning" just creates different taste.

Elizabeth Tai | 戴秀铃 🇲🇾Jul 30, 2023

@jesuisatire @kissane in that sense I can understand the conflict. Wish, I'm a way, that it was big enough to accommodate different ways of thought without clashes.

jeSuisatire neindochohh ᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷ Jul 30, 2023

I guess the clash is inevitable, that's why I wrote growing pain. In any case the slower we grow the more time we have to establish a new culture, to evolve at least some changes for the better.

In general terms, the idea of "one world, one internet, let's connect all together" is wrong and a really bad idea.
What we need and should evolve is a loose interconnected setup of nodes that creates space for every one.

If it grows to fast we'll become occupied and separate more.

Elizabeth Tai | 戴秀铃 🇲🇾Jul 30, 2023

@jesuisatire @kissane Yea! I so agree. On twitter, the Malaysian side existed in its bubble, mostly because of the language giving it a natural separation, but when we post I English we get the clash of civilisations so to speak

jeSuisatire neindochohh ᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷ Jul 30, 2023

@liztai
> but when we post English

To a certain extent we multilingual people even have different personalities depending on the language we use.
(actually that's when the "me" in "I" becomes disturbed about who this "it" inside really is, if there is anything at all)
😮

Elizabeth Tai | 戴秀铃 🇲🇾Jul 30, 2023

@jesuisatire @kissane hah I think I replied to the wrong thread. But yeah I think of CWs the same way.

Scott Killen 🇺🇸Jul 30, 2023

@liztai @kissane Ironic that people try to shut you down for not adhering to the "accepted" narrative. I hate that society seems to be shifting from listening to everyone and benefiting from each nugget of goodness to shouting down anything that doesn't match what one wants to hear.

Free discussion allows us to escape the echo chamber chamber chamber of vacuous brains.

Elizabeth Tai | 戴秀铃 🇲🇾Jul 30, 2023

@scott @kissane yea it is a disturbing trend I am seeing both in the left and right of the spectrum, mostly on the US side.

Elizabeth Tai | 戴秀铃 🇲🇾Jul 30, 2023

@scott @kissane that's why people like you are a breath of fresh air. I don't feel like I have to walk on eggshells! 😂

DavidPetraitis Jul 30, 2023

@liztai
In this time of decline personal toxicity is a character trait.
I just don't know if it is biologically wired or a narrative.

Elizabeth Tai | 戴秀铃 🇲🇾Jul 30, 2023

@DavidPetraitis oh I am pretty sure it's biological. I read that social media capitalises on our wiring to get us hooked on it.

DavidPetraitis Jul 30, 2023

@liztai I was being careful, since I don't know you. I agree. Psy-war is real and happening.

𝐂𝐫𝐢𝐦𝐞𝐃𝐚𝐝 Jul 30, 2023

@liztai @kissane A few years ago I made a shit post featuring an image of a fish being held up to the camera by an angler. Someone replied that I should have used a content warning. They were polite enough so I politely responded that I would never use a CW for such a post. And that was that. Sometimes you just have to tell people to pound sand.

Elizabeth Tai | 戴秀铃 🇲🇾Jul 30, 2023

@fathermcgruder @kissane I did the same when someone told me to CW a food photo. I wasn't as polite as you were though 😂

abhijith Jul 30, 2023

@liztai @fathermcgruder @kissane I was not aware of this problem for a long while and I felt that people were totally against any use of CWs. It was @dalias who explained the situation to me and I am very thankful for that.

Nick Dixon Jul 31, 2023

@liztai @kissane I've not received lectures on mastodon etiquette yet. Maybe I'm just not active enough on here and when I am, it'll happen. But I also wonder if, as elsewhere, women get flamed more than men do?

Elizabeth Tai | 戴秀铃 🇲🇾Jul 31, 2023

@nickdixon I can't answer that definitively but I do get a lot of condescending replies about how to do basic tech stuff 😄